Greater America An Interpretation Of Latin American In Relation To Anglosaxon America

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GREATER AMERICA

By
WALLACE THOMPSON

THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO

THE MEXICAN MIND

9
TRADING WITH MEXICO

RAINBOW COUNTRIES
OF CENTRAL AMERICA

GREATER AMERICA

GREATER AMERICA

AN INTERPRETATION OF LATIN
AMERICA IN RELATION TO ANGLO-
SAXON AMERICA**

By
WALLACE THOMPSON, Litt. D., F.R.G.S.

Author of "Rainbow Countries
of Central America," etc.
Editor of Ingenieria Internadonal

E. P. BUTTON & CO., INC.

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

m, AMfEICA, COPYRIGHT, 1932,
BY *P," COTTON i CO., INC. : : ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED : : PRINTED IN U.S.A.

FIRST EDITION

TO
NANCY CLARK DIXON THOMPSON

MY WIFE

PREFACE

THIS is not a book of travel; it is not a study of sociology, a
history or a compendium of commercial figures and oppor-
tunities. It has been conceived and written as an introduc-
tion, for those who have no acquaintance with Latin Amer-
ica, to the most important, and the most confusing, of all
the new regions of the world, and for those who do know
Latin America, it is designed to be a train of thought to lead
them into the dazzling and colorful future that lies before
the southern two-thirds of the Western Hemisphere, in its
relation with the northern third.

The literature of fact and analysis about Latin America is
growing and improving in value and solidity each year.
Further and further our research pushes back the mystery
of this nation or that, of this field of knowledge or that
world of opportunity. By the very intensity of the analysis,
he who would find his way today into the subject of Latin
America or, being in it as a business man, a scholar or a
diplomat, would touch the vital stream of its realities, is
more confused, perhaps, than was his prototype of ten
years ago.

Our tendency in studying or even observing Latin Amer-
ica is to sectionalize it, and I would record here that I too
hold sincerely that no one can ever understand Latin Amer-
ica even superficially who does not realize the tremendous
spaces in every field of judgment that separate nations and
regions. But none the less our approach is toward Latin
America as a whole, and(as a whole we must first grasp it)
When we have done that we can, and must, continue with
our more specific experiences or studies.

All of the popular general books about Latin America are

7

8 Preface

travel books, or of the type of the travel book, and seek to
lead the reader into a knowledge of the region by the steps
the author himself took, or, in the light of later knowledge,
would take if he were doing it again. The modern man
or woman no longer has the leisure or the patience to enter
upon a subject in this way. He prefers, by the hundreds of
thousands, to begin his exploration of Africa, for instance,
on the back porch of a modern bungalow, and through the
eyes of an old man selling iron grills, but an old man who
has seen it all and knows it all as he knows the palm of
his hand.

The author of this book is no greybeard selling electric
waffle-irons but he has known Latin America longer and
better, now, than he knew the home of his boyhood, and
he has advised innumerable travelers and business men and
others as to how to know Latin America best and most
quickly. His greatest difficulty in giving that advice has
been to find books, simple, comprehensive books, to suggest
as an introduction or to serve as a guide into the deeper
significances of that region. Such a book he is offering now.
He believes that it will fill a need, and will serve, in some
modest way, to stimulate that interest, that faith not alone
in the destiny of Latin America, but in its definite and
brilliant future in company with what they to the South call
"Saxon America" that is, the United States and Canada.

This book has, therefore, a mission, and an ideal. The
mission is to serve those who would know Latin America, or
would know it better. The ideal is expressed in its title,
and has its roots deep in the faith that the Greater America
is one of the noblest goals of the future, one of those inevita-
ble developments in man's unfolding that the wisest in-
stinctively rise to make their own, and the ablest find forced
upon them and commanding their energies and labor. It is

Preface 9

an ideal, differing from (because modern empires are no
longer built through the extension of the flag or the political
domination of peoples and regions) but yet thrillingly like
the ideal of "Greater Britain" which became the shibboleth
of "Little Britain's" expansion in the long reign of Queen
Victoria, and so created the British Empire, veritably on the
foundations of men's own faith that it might be.

No one can guess exactly how that Greater America is to
come into being; all we can know is that it is being created
beneath our feet today. Nor can we envision with any
accuracy what will be its contribution to the ultimate of
human development. But we can trace the future dimly,
not from the past which it must utterly transcend, but rather
from the forces that have come into being in the past and
that are in course of creation today. These forces this book
seeks to set down for you. To me, this approach is the surest
and most worthy introduction to Latin America, and the
most clarifying means to a crystallization of our thoughts
about the much or the little that each one of us knows today
about Latin America. It is offered in that spirit and in the
hope that it will so serve.

WALLACE THOMPSON.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE 7

I. THE LAST TREASURE-HOUSE 15

II. THE END OF FOUR CENTURIES OF EXPLOITATION . 27

III. THE AREAS TO BE RECLAIMED 39

IV. THE COMING OF POPULATIONS 60

V. THE GROWTH OF COMMUNICATIONS 82

VI. THE UNFOLDING OF ECONOMIC POWER .... 122

VII. MUSCLES, MACHINES AND THE JUNGLE .... 144

VIII. FOREIGN GOLD AND LOCAL BUSINESS 169

IX. TARIFFS AND TRADE 184

X. POLITICS AND PROGRESS 199

XI. NATIONALISM AND FOREIGN RELATIONS .... 222
XII. THE UNITY OF THE AMERICAS 242

BIBLIOGRAPHY 249

INDEX 269

GREATER AMERICA

Chapter I
THE LAST TREASURE-HOUSE

FOR four hundred years, one of the mightiest reservoirs of
wealth in human history has Iain, virtually untouched, in
the midst of the world. For three centuries of the life of
Latin America, Old World adventurers scraped up the ac-
cumulated gold and silver of millenniums of easy Indian
civilizations, opened the richest mines and carried the spices
and "specialties" of a barbarous America to Europe. That
Europe, bowed and slipping in the misery of the poverty
inherited from the Dark Ages, raised its head, grew,
prospered, became the proud mistress of the world. Latin
America, virtually alone and under the crudest exploitation
imaginable, rehabilitated Europe, created a new age (for
Europe) and when its gifts ceased to be easy, itself slipped
back into the coma of its late colonial poverty.

During the last years of the three centuries of colonial
rule and into the first century of independence, Latin Amer-
ica slept in the memory of its glorious past. Few ships
travelled over the seas to Spain, and British, French and
Dutch traders were still discouraged from commercial inter-
course and even from travel. Then slowly, but with increas-
ing momentum, a new era of exploitation set in. For the
last three-quarters of the Nineteenth Century these lands,
whose riches to old Spain were in their gold and silver and
precious stones alone, were developed into sources of the
raw materials of commercial Europe. The immemorial fate
of the Tropics, since Tyre and Venice first chained them to
the galleys of their commerce, settled over the vast areas

of the Americas.

15

16 Greater America

The symbol of this era, which came down and into the
first decade of this century, was the plantation system, with
its fecund but unvaried crops, and the setting up of vast
capitalistic machinery for the production of raw materials
of mine and field and forest. How deep that enslavement
to raw materials was, few realized until the great drop in
commodity prices of 1930. Latin America emerged then as
actually but little better off than during the colonial era, its
place in the world's economy but little more secure than the
status of interior Africa. The world crisis left most of the
countries of Latin America gasping, because there was noth-
ing in their economy that gave opportunity for recovery
without the patronage of the world for its goods or for its
government bonds. And both were at the lowest ebb in
their history.

Yet the world is hungry, today, for new markets. It de-
mands, over broader areas, higher standards of living that
will create new and enlarged demands for what it makes
and for what the raw-materials countries themselves produce.
The crowded nations of the world demand yet another
thing, that is, place in the new countries for their surplus
populations, room where the emigrating hordes can build,
not little Englands, little Germanys or little Japans, but new
homes where they may live and prosper, unharassed by the
crowd's pressure, and grow to economic units in the new
nations which they are now ready to make their own as
they have made the United States and Canada their new
homelands.

Yet heretofore all our building of the new countries and
new markets has been haphazard, unstudied, piteously
wasteful. We have poured our resources, our capital and
our human power broadcast over the world, into mad
schemes, into hopeless projects in lands which cannot, for

The Last Treasure-House 17

half a thousand years, approach the ideal of our needs for
soundly growing centers of new civilization, lands and
projects which must for that long, at least, remain nebulous
and incomplete, despite our unstudied enthusiasms. We
have not chosen, as now we must choose, the area of the
world which can first command our attention and should
first be given the opportunity, the resources, the studied
and steady support of capital and immigrants that will de-
velop it into the source of the new economic and demo-
graphic strength which the world must have.

Latin America occupies, geographically, that center and
focus of the development of the future. It covers nearly
a fifth of the area of the world that is subject to ultimate
development and yet it has, roughly, only one-twentieth of
the population of the world today. Its resources have been
sung in paeans of praise for all its known history, and fully
half of what has been said is sober truth a tremendous pro-
portion for any unknown region to command. The Panama
Canal carries the east-west traffic of the world through that
dooryard of Latin America, the Caribbean Sea, and Buenos
Aires, the southernmost of the great harbors of the world,
is fourth in activity and shipping London, New York and
Hamburg alone surpass it. Latin America's foreign trade
totals about $5,000,000,000 a year, a healthy sum even when
compared with the estimated trade of the world, which is
about $70,000,000,000. (The exports are composed largely of
raw materials, however, and many of the imports represent,
not a healthy international trade but a poverty of those home
industries which alone build up the living standards and the
buying power of nations as of villages.) The potentialities
of that area and even of its present population have only
begun to manifest themselves; what it can and will do in a

i8 Greater America

quarter of a century from now, with a greater population
and a more concentrated development of its resources, leaves
the imagination utterly untrammeled, for the dream can
hardly surpass the actualities of that future.

Latin America has been held back by very definite factors
from too early a ripening of its economic power under
ultimately destructive conditions. Chief of these factors has
been its freedom from European and Asiatic colonial ex-
ploitation. The Monroe Doctrine, a much abused inter-
national policy, has been mightily effective; the contrast of
what has happened to Africa in the past century and to Asia
before and during that century, with what has not happened
to Latin America is proof enough of its achievement of the
protection from European partition and colonization. And
in Latin America itself the proof persists.

There is no question jhat, but for the opposition of the
United States, large and prosperous German colonies would
now occupy southern Brazil, portions at least of Chile and
probably of Argentina. The cofif ee industry of Central Amer-
ica, to a large extent German in its management, would long
since have given excuse for interventions and annexation to
Germany. Great Britain's undeniable interests in the Carib-
bean would have brought her new colonies, Nicaragua,
Panama, probably Costa Rica. Argentina, the gem of the
constellation of Latin America, might conceivably today be
British by nationality as well as by a notable admixture of
English blood. And so on around the list, until Japan itself
looms in the picture.

It is no idle talk that excepting for the unwritten but prob-
ably not unspoken support of Washington to the fears of
Peru, Japan might even now be more strongly entrenched
than she is in the population of Western South America.
But for the Monroe 'Doctrine (which is always the easiest
way of expressing a foreign policy of the United States that

The Last Treasure-House 19

perhaps needs no statement now but which certainly includes
Japan in the prohibition against colonies in the American
hemisphere), there might well be yet other Japanese national
colonies on the American mainland. The fact that Latin
America has been closed to colonies of energetic peoples is
unquestionably one great factor, perhaps the greatest, in the
continuing state of undevelopment there, but it has saved
those lands until today, with the opportunities of the present
for their own vigorous and capable populations.

Those populations have grown out of the elements within
themselves, and into them entered, healthily, well-controlled
foreign elements, Germans (without colonial prospects
although not, perhaps, without hopes), English, Italians,
Spaniards, North Americans, Japanese and Chinese. They
mingled rapidly with the already mixed races of Portugal
and the Spanish provinces (themselves a vivid and individ-
ualistic variety), with Indians of a dozen great and differing
strains, and with the Negroes who had been brought in the
colonial days from Africa. *A melting pot it was, and is,
compared to which the melting pot of the United States is
a mere bubbling over a camp fire, v This Latin American
race, whose characteristics develop more and more clearly
and in actuality veer with strange fatality toward certain
characteristics of the new race of North America, dominates
Latin America today. It will not change that domination,
probably, in any immediate future, for it will absorb, as
Saxon America has absorbed, the flow of immigrants that
will come with commercial and industrial growth and with
the rising standard of living that follows.

How great the opportunity of Latin America, and how
great the world's need of the opening of its treasure-house
and of its powers for the creation of new wealth and new
human prosperity, lies today as an open book before a world

20 Greater America

that can and must, for the next crowded century, develop
its resources with slow deliberation and far-sighted wisdom.
Ten years after the close of the Great War, men saw civiliza-
tion tumbling toward collapse. A world bankruptcy, whose
causes extended over the whole gamut of human enterprise,
apparently threatened. The collapse of commodity prices
seemed to indicate that too much was being produced, and
the slump of the trade in manufactured goods that there
were not enough people able and willing to buy. The pos-
sible, perhaps the final, answer has been the bringing into
being of a new world where raw commodities might be
given additional worth before they enter world markets
and where, in that adding of fractions in value to raw ex-
ports, there might be created a new buying power that will
demand, and consume, the quantities of surplus products
that, by their lack of markets, have slowed up the tempo
of the whole world.

Only a little over a century ago, at the time that the
Monroe Doctrine was promulgated, George Canning, the
British Prime Minister, declared that he himself had "called
the New World into existence, to redress the balance of
the Old." There has been some mild debate, largely on
patriotic lines, as to the justice of the personal claim in this
assertion but the fact is beyond dispute, certainly in the
political realm, that the New World has redressed the bal-
ance of the Old. But a greater question than politics looms
and the creation of a new world of economic power in North
America has dominated the industrial and commercial prog-
ress of the world. Yet to far-visioned men for years, and
to some of the wisest for a century past, there is yet another
step to be taken. The New World must be called into full
being, must take its part as the keystone of the economic
arch of modern civilization. To that end not alone Saxon
America, with its vast resources and tremendous manu-

The Last Treasure-House 21

facturing and buying power, but Latin America, with its
wealth of materials and men of the tropics and of the moun-
tains and of the south temperate zone, must come into full
flower. Destiny has long pointed toward that dim ideal.
Today it has become a necessity of our civilization.

In the crisis of 1921, the economic power of Latin America
was obscured by the very practical difficulties of over-orders
and crowded stocks that wrecked the plans for the im-
mediate revival of that depression, but it was a fact seen
clearly by a few that the world would probably have had
a better chance of recovery, even then, if the wealth which
was later poured into the open maw of Europe could have
been diverted deliberately to the building up of Latin Amer-
ica. An investment of great capital in Latin America, even
in the crude ways in which capital was then invested
there, would undoubtedly have created vast and permanent
new markets for goods and machines and materials.
Latin America would have become literally an incubator of
wealth and the return, not the capital itself, would have
provided a sounder rescue than could possibly be accom-
plished, as 1931 proved, in the pouring of that capital into
Europe's bottomless pit. But the money, was, after all,
poured into Europe, and not until the orgy of spending
which culminated in 1929 had set in was Latin America
considered a field for investment. Even then there was no
studied plan, no careful preparation such as, alone, can serve
to build a new world of business and trade and human wel-
fare.

Even when the flood of golden investment came, it was
unstudied, uncontrolled, and dried up almost overnight
after six years of spending without direction and with-
out supervision. Not yet has Latin America had the op-
portunity for which it had waited for four centuries, not yet

22 Greater America

has it even begun to take its place in the economic world.
The collapse of 1930 showed all too plainly that its products
were still essentially raw materials to which virtually
nothing had been added before shipment, and in whose
preparation the methods of a century had gone on virtually
unchanged.

A sweeping statement, that, but the notable exceptions
only emphasize its inherent truth. Immense importations
of machinery have gone into Latin America, modern meth-
ods in meat packing, fruit growing, in the handling of cer-
tain steps in the preparation and shipping processes have
been adopted, but the field is still practically virgin. Latin
America uses, still, but a fraction of the machinery that
would lighten its tasks and redouble its human power. Yet
the very fact that its development has been delayed, as was
laid bare by the revelations of the depression of 1931, is in
itself promise of what may be when organization comes.
And that future is not, certainly, of goods and markets
alone, but of human welfare and social and political prog-
ress in every branch.

The tendency toward greater industrialization, toward
that development which is so simply expressed by the add-
ing of a fraction of value to raw commodities before they
are shipped, is pronounced today from one end of Latin
America to the other. Twenty nations await the aid and
the help and the demand from the older nations to enter
into a new era of their development. The peoples, through
the slow evolution of the past century of independence and
thus of varied increments of population, are ready, now,
for that help and that counsel. They can be definitely
moved to become a part of the development of the world,
and to do it under the helpful aid of the older peoples of
their own America, and with a definite end in view.

The Last Treasure-House 23

The financial phase of such a continental development is
not the least of its problems; it is perhaps the first, granted
thd premises which have been set down here. These needs
take two forms. One is for a new flow of capital investment.
The other, which is perhaps more definitely practical today,
is for longer credits that will enable progressive industrial-
ists and engineers to obtain, under terms justified by their
needs and reliability and by the soundness of their business
plans, the machinery and the supplies that will enable them
to continue their industrialization and to expand it. Both
lead to the development of that higher standard of living
which will naturally result in the purchase, by millions who
will be raised up from the populations of today, of more
goods abroad, even if of very different kinds than are now
imported. Thus, by the adding of this new purchasing
power to the reservoir of world wealth, we shall bring into
the balance of all the older world the vivid power and real-
ity of the newer nations.

Of investments, there is one profound truth that must be
stated thus early. This is, that as in the past most of the in-
vestments in Latin America have been in government se-
curities and therefore limited by fixed public incomes which
in time of crisis fall and make the burdens of debt excessive,
so in the future the trend of investments must inevitably
reach into new directions, into industries, into productive
public works, and into supervised expenditures of every sort
under engineers and industrialists. The loans to govern-
ments in Latin America in 1923-29 generally were not ex-
cessive, even if some of them were wasted, by the standard
of the incomes of the boom years. Many of those loans
were for purposes which properly might have been ex-
tended for payment over fifty or even a hundred years. But
beyond the type of government loan which the world's in-
sularity (and particularly that of the United States) made

24 Greater A merica

the rule in that investment era, rise the opportunities of con-
trolled, supervised investments in national and private
"plant" for the creation of that higher standard of living
and buying power that is the economic demand of the
world.

"New markets" are, however, but a portion of the world's
need for the creation of a Greater America, of a new power
in the countries of Latin America. Those nations present,
even more definitely than Australia, New Zealand and
South Africa, outposts of the type of civilization on which
the world we know has been built. They have suffered, in-
variably, by the reflections of distress periods in Europe
and in the United States. They are definitely a part of the
world in which we live. Culturally, they are of the same
great Aryan strain to which we turn; there is no break
there with tradition or experience. They hold, those few
millions of men and women of our cultural and racial
strains (mixed though they be with autochthonous races
which they are definitely absorbing into their national life),
a vast area of the earth's surface. That area they cannot
hold alone, either against the reversions to lower types that
now and then seem to be the characteristics of their polit-
ical history, or against a future spread of the Oriental races
into this rich region. Europe for a few years, and then
North America, will definitely need those areas for expan-
sion and for the living of their own peoples, peoples like
Latin Americans and a part of the civilization to which
they belong. Latin America must have help to retain its
place, and it must also have the type of help that will de-
velop its commercia] and financial strength.

A quarter of a century looms as a relatively small space
of time, but in the history of the United States, of Canada,

The Last Treasure-House 25

or of Latin America it is crowded with possibilities. The
past half-century of the history of the American nations in
the North of the hemisphere is crowded and colorful. Into
it entered myriad forces, part of which we can analyze,
and part of which still remain vague but none the less
dominating. The next twenty-five years will see tremen-
dous changes, both here and there, but probably more in
Latin America than in the North. It is certain that their
populations will increase, but probably in waves, not in
any steady stream either to this country or to that. It is
certain that the south temperate zone and, surely and not
slowly as man makes increasing gains by his machinery,
the cool highlands of the sub-Tropics and Tropics, will
become new granaries of the world. This will come des-
pite overproduction today of every food that man eats;
growing populations and new trends in economic structure
in the older as well as in the newer nations will take care
of that. They will add more and more, even to their food-
stuffs, before they go abroad. Their wheat will become
flour, their coffee perhaps coffee extract, their nitrate fin-
ished fertilizers or gunpowder, their fruits perfectly graded,
or tinned to meet the needs of distant peoples, their meats
cut into chops and steaks and, with quick-frozen processes,
come to the world's kitchens unchanged by long shipments.
Time will be annihilated; within the next two or three
years, airplanes will carry travelers from New York to
Buenos Aires in three days, less of a change than the first
air mail that came in ten days, as compared with three
weeks by steamer an event which took place in 1929!
North and south the lines of air travel are safe and sure, as
are radio and the sea lanes and railways and roads, indeed.
Geography has united the Americas, and the grasping of the
opportunities and the needs of the future will link them and
help them to grow 1 more closely together.

26 Greater America

Latin America has reached the end of the period of easy
acceptance of exploitation, It is a moment of vital impor-
tance to those countries and to the world. The glut of raw
commodities in 1930 was in large part due to uneconomic,
uncontrolled production on an exploitation basis, either by
foreign companies or local political leaders, in Latin
America. That day is gone, and probably forever. Invest-
ments in the future will control it by more skilled and more
far-seeing supervision of expenditures in the light of world
needs and markets. Economic self-sufficiency is the de-
mand, today, in the countries of Latin America. It is a gal-
lant demand, and to its achievement will move all the
forces of their national organizations. The world will, in
the future, have something to say as to that, and through
the investment of new moneys and the extension of new
credits, the wisdom of long experience will be brought at
last to the determination of the directions of Latin American
advance. That it will be toward closer cooperation with
the United States and with Canada is inevitable from the
tendencies of the past. That this will bring Latin America
more definitely into the world of affairs, is destiny.

The last treasure-house, one virtually untouched by the
long history of its easy exploitation, remains to be opened.
The world has need of its wealth, and of its power for the
creation of a new cultural and economic unit about itself.
This is the place for a Greater America, and this the destiny
that makes its promise the most outstanding fact in our
world today.

Chapter II

THE END OF FOUR CENTURIES OF
EXPLOITATION

LATIN AMERICA is as deeply founded as is Saxon America on
the ideals of political and economic independence. Today
the national will of twenty countries holds firmly to the
determination that not only shall no foreign power domi-
nate its political life but that no foreign power, individual
or national, financial or commercial, shall dominate or
greatly influence its economic life. The coming quarter of
a century seems destined to see a significant sharpening of
this grasp for untrammeled liberty. Its complete acceptance
by the world outside will be one of the first and greatest
steps in the harmonious development of the Americas. The
United States has for the past decade contributed, by its in-
vestments and its machinery, unconsciously to this end.
The broader acceptance of the idea, and studied planning
to make it a full reality as a part of the creation in Latin
America of new markets and new sources of wealth, will
certainly be one of the outstanding features of inter-Ameri-
can diplomacy and business in the new twenty-five years.
Liberty has for a century been far from an abstraction to
Latin America. There were many "Tories" amongst the
Creoles (the native-born whites) in the hectic period of revo-
lution, but once political separation was proven possible,
there was comparatively little divergence of opinion on the
importance of the independence of the various countries
although there was enough controversy, certainly, on the
form of the government. Politically, however, the Spanish

Creoles of South America, Mexico, Central America and

27

28 Greater America

the Antilles had been kept in a tutelage which, after three
centuries, hacf left them with but little knowledge or train-
ing for the new tasks of government in their independent
republics. No Creole could hold high office in the colonies
and, save in the municipalities, none could rule over the
others or over the Indians. The lowliest immigrant from
Spain was eligible for any office in the gift of king or
viceroy, while the cultivated native-born sons of former
rulers were automatically shut off from power and oppor-
tunity. We need not wonder at their firmness in determin-
ing to hold to their hard-won freedom.

There was an even greater unanimity on the question of
economic independence. Through all the three centuries of
Spanish rule (and the case was largely paralleled in Portu-
guese Brazil, despite its later importance as the seat of the
government of the combined empire of Portugal and
Brazil) exploitation by the crown was the basis of colonial
relationship. The Pope had granted the vast spaces of the
New World to Spain and Portugal, holding only to the de-
mand that their kings convert the Indians to Christianity.
The gift was taken literally. The gold and silver of the
rich Indian empires became automatically the property of
the king, trade was stifled, except between the mother coun-
try and the colonies, and this was so even when the ships
which had come in such numbers in the earlier years had
dwindled to one small convoy a year. The colonies were
prohibited from manufacturing anything that Spain or
Portugal could produce. The English, French and Dutch
traders who came first to the infrequent open fairs and then
remained to smuggle and later, as buccaneers, to waylay
the convoys of laden galleons, made themselves barely felt
in the continuous economic domination of the Spanish
fatherland.

The End of Four Centuries of Exploitation 29

Their economic difficulties under Spain had made the
colonials, when they emerged to independent nationhood,
bitterly suspicious of all European commercial overtures.
This feeling and the inexperience, in commerce as in gov-
ernment, of which they were so painfully conscious, at first
made them frankly fearful of the designs of the English
and French who sought their trade and, in the earliest pe-
riod of their national expansion, sought also the control of
their ports and communications with the outside world.
These suspicions have not all disappeared with the passing
years, for they were founded in bitter memories.

The English colonies which declared their independence
in 1776 had suffered their own difficulties in trade restric-
tions that were similar in kind, if not in severity, to those
of the Spanish colonials. But looking back on the latter, it
is difficult to realize that these abuses could have endured
for 300 years, for fully 200 of which the population was con-
siderable and the trade a notable factor in the wealth of old
Spain. The oldest English colonies of North America had
been founded but 150 years and the bulk of the population
had been in America but two generations when the revolu-
tion which created the United States broke out, as the re-
sult of abuses infinitesimal in comparison with those suf-
fered for three centuries by succeeding generations of co-
lonial-born Spaniards. He who thinks that the present-day
desire for economic independence is not deep-rooted, lacks
one fact that will clarify all the studv of the present and the
future in Latin America.

Raw materials, in the thought of civilized man, have been
something that comes from beyond the seas, chiefly from the
Tropics, to be manufactured at home and both consumed
at home and shipped abroad (back to the Tropics often

30 Greater America

enough) in forms which induce even the original produc-
ers to buy them by paying quadrupled values in the same
or other raw materials for them. South America learned
in the three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese rule what
it meant to be at that end of the market. Primarily they
dug gold and silver from the earth and shipped it home,
but they also sent fibers and dyes, spices and foodstuffs and
all the simple things that simple men have from the be-
ginning of history gathered for the more sophisticated and
traded in exchange for glass beads and gaily printed cloths.
In the early centuries of Spanish rule, the indigenous na-
tives were driven as slaves to meet the greed of the con-
querors. The Indians so many hundreds or thousands,
as specified were given as grants with the land to the
favorites of the king or viceroy. In the years of gruelling
labor under heartless overseers (often their own kin and
blood), they died by the hundreds of thousands and per-
haps by the millions, for we do not know how many In-
dians there were, Negro slaves from Africa were there-
after imported into the Spanish and Portuguese Americas
probably in greater numbers than into the present area of
the United States. They went first to replace the Indians,
or to regions where there had been but a sparse population
of Indians, but in the end they became the backbone of the
production of the plantations which grew up in the later
colonial days. Most went to the sugar-producing islands of
the West Indies, but a vast population of blacks were also
taken to and have been absorbed into the populations of
Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, all the Caribbean
islands and the portions of South America that still remain
colonies of Europe; that is, British, Dutch and French
Guiana.
Meanwhile, the white men born to those who had once

The End of Four Centuries of Exploitation 31

come from Spain and Portugal had themselves slipped into
an inferior position, as noted, to the "Peninsulares," or men
from the Iberian peninsula. The wrongs of the Indians and
Negroes meant little to them, perhaps, until they began to
need those lower "castes" for their armies in the revolu-
tions, but the sense of wrongs political and economic was
borne in upon them all, high and low, black, brown and
white, increasingly as time went on.

This political and social inferiority (of which more in
later chapters) was but part of the system by which the
New World was chained to the profit of the Old. The
economic philosophy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries held as a primary principle that the precious
metals alone were wealth. Mexico and Peru furnished
these in great abundance, and while the production of raw
materials was encouraged to a certain extent, as by the Brit-
ish in their overseas possessions, gold and silver were re-
garded as the chief source of the wealth of the Indies.
Both in English and in Spanish and Portuguese America,
there was that discouragement of local manufacture, for the
colonies were regarded as fields for the trade of the home
manufacturer, even when the gold and silver with which
he was paid were in constant danger of confiscation, with-
out recourse, by the Crown.

The production of the mines was assured by a rigorous
labor control of the Indians under the system of slavery or
death for armed resistance and, later, of the encomiendas
and repartimientos. Under slavery, cruelties untold took
place in mines and plantations, and the Indians died like
flies. The encomiendas, under which Spanish favorites re-
ceived whole villages as feudal fiefs and with feudal obli-
gations of care and religious conversion, proved little bet-

y- Greater America

ter save for the furnishing, thus, of serfs for the fields and
mines. The cncomicndas were virtually abolished in 1542.
The rcp&rtirnlentos, literally "distributions/ 5 while origin-
ally the first grant of feudal rights (the encomienda being,
literally, a confirmation of that grant, with hereditary rights
to the second and even down to the fourth generation),
came finally to mean the feudal control of villages and
groups of Indians and, more specifically, to refer to those
used in the slave gangs of the mines.

Meanwhile, Indians were of course driven to the cultiva-
tion of the land and the raising of food for their overlords
and for the slaves of the mines. j The Indians of virtually
all of what is now Latin America were agricultural in their
economic habits, and, unlike the wilder tribes of northern
North America, were easily turned to plantation labor,
Into this phase entered the work of the friars and Jesuits,
The missions which penetrated far into the present United
States and into the distant interior of all of the countries
of Latin America were models of administration and (for
that day) efficient production. Great companies of Indians
were brought under the benificent sway of the priests, pri-
marily for their education in Christian doctrine but second-
arily, and effectively, for discipline and the teaching of
agriculture and animal husbandry. The missions had a tre-
mendous influence, and if they reached but few and if they
failed to inculcate ideas of independent achievement, yet in
the end they added' their bit to the economic life and to the
future foundations of productive society in Latin America.

In the conquering of the vast areas at their hand, the
Spaniards and Portuguese were limited by their own stand-
ards of wealth and by the concepts of the age in which they
lived. They conquered the mountains, for their hardy ex-
plorers unearthed virtually every high-grade gold and silver

The End of Four Centuries of Exploitation 33

mine of importance which has since been known through-
out Latin America; the tradition even down to today is that
where the Spanish explorer found nothing, it is almost use-
less to seek. They developed their prospects often into deep
shafts and tunnels that broke away from the old rat-hole
system of following the vein which the Indians, and the
first Spaniards, had instinctively used. The writing of the
priests of a practical turn of mind which have come down to
us are often remarkable in their descriptions and in the
theories and practice of metallurgy which they discuss.

But the Spaniards did not conquer the jungle or the des-
ert or the vast distances. The great plains of Argentina,
comparable in every way (and often to the benefit of Ar-
gentina) to those of mid-Western United States and Can-
ada, were never taken by the white men until fifty years of
independence had passed. It has remained for the de-
scendants of the pioneers, using in large part the methods
and the machines which had been evolved in the United
States during the preceding fifty years, to begin the solution
of the problems of distance, and of jungle and desert. That
conquest is a history of our own time, the foundation that
has been built, laboriously and with many failures, for the
solid structure of the future toward which these pages look.

In commerce, as has been suggested, the colonial epoch
was definitely and rigorously limited. Trade was alone
with Spain or Portugal, and foreigners were excluded from
the colonies on pain of death. Foreign merchants could
come only to the fairs which were held at long intervals
the chief one at Puerto Bello, in Panama, south and east of
the present Caribbean mouth of the Canal and in colonial
times the terminus of the great causeway that crossed the
isthmus to the City of Panama on the Pacific. Even trade

34 Greater America

between the Spanish colonies was restricted, and the num-
ber of ships which could go to any single port was a sub-
ject of decree, and of orders that were obeyed. Two ships
a year only were permitted to go to Buenos Aires, and this
rule designed to maintain the primacy of the Viceroyalty
at Lima resulted in the establishment of the long trail
over the Andes from Lima to Buenos Aires, across which
passed the bulk of all the freight that ever reached the set-
tlement which is now the queen city of Spanish America.
The galleons traveled from Spain to Puerto Bello, their
cargoes were transshipped across the Isthmus on muleback
and by human: carriers, and reshipped again down the long
Pacific coast to Lima. Thence that designed for Buenos
Aires went, by mule, llama and porter, over the Andes and
down the rivers or across the plains to that distant haven.
The colonial Spaniards were hardy tradesmen, but in ac-
tual practice the net result was to limit their needs and to
keep them chained to their few imports and to the goods
they themselves could make out of rough local materials.
The Spartan simplicity of their lives, and the lack of de-
velopment of the needs of the Indians, certainly accounted,
well down to the present, for the limited and but slowly
growing markets which the European traders found when,
after the independence, they first took their way with ships
and goods to the ports of Latin America. Centuries of lim-
ited living had reduced wants to a minimum, and it has
been only through years of slow social as well as economic
development that higher standards of wages, based upon as
well as creating new needs, have come into full force.

When the revolutions had been won in the first two dec-
ades of the Nineteenth Century in Spanish America, and
long before the separation of Portugal and Brazil, the new

The End of Four Centuries of Exploitation 35

nations turned to the task of creating their national en-
tities. Debt and political inexperience weighed upon them,
their economic growth was a thing that was yet to come.
They must import, and to buy abroad they must produce
raw materials as in the old colonial days, or borrow. It is
hardly to be wondered that they turned first to the loan-
wicket in the international market place. The story of that
first experience is one that has come down to this day, and
has embittered both South American borrowers and Eng-
lish, French and Dutch lenders. The investment cycle of
1923-31 with its difficulties, waste and defaults is light read-
ing compared with the tales of the Nineteenth Century
financing of Latin America by Europe.

In that earlier era of expansion, men were thinking in
terms of a "new political economy." Its primary tenet was
that the experience of the past rather than an estimate of
the future was obviously consulted each nation should
produce that which it found it could best produce and
should exchange that product for the things that other na-
tions made, and that there should be free and unrestricted
trade between all nations. Most of us have forgotten that
primary element in the English doctrine of free trade
that the nations should produce that which they could make
most satisfactorily. But Latin America does not forget, for
that was the end which she held up, with little glory and
less profit. By that dictum, which forced vast areas, nations
indeed, to the concentration on such crops as sugar or coffee,
rubber or copper, wheat or wool, Latin America was
brought back once more into economic bondage to Europe,
and that before one nation of the whole twenty had had
a chance to try anything else!

For a full century that tutelage lasted, grimly binding the
rich countries of South America and Central America, Mex-

36 Greater America

ico and the West Indies, to the production of raw materials.
They were encouraged, as under Spain, to have no manu-
factories, no means of adding aught to those raw materials,
and were utterly without experience to offer any other eco-
nomic plan. The most modern enterprises became the min-
ing companies, or logging, hemp, banana, sugar and coffee
plantations. The plantation peonage system, differing
hardly in anything but name from the old Spanish cnco*
miendas, gripped and held Latin America in its vise.

To struggle was apparently useless. A few of the richer
nations, with growing populations of British and native-
born Britons, of Italians, French and Germans, were begin-
ning to see a chance to emerge, as the first decade of this
century ended, fust before the outbreak of the World War,
there were intelligent, perfectly coherent economists and
leaders who saw that there must be an escape, and in their
search they turned to every hand and to every nation that
was in contact with them.

Argentina first, and in a lesser degree Brazil and Chile,
were emerging, with the help of foreign investments, and
were putting in local factories, tiny, uneconomic affairs,
nursed to life and maintained alive by hothouse tariffs. But
even then bitterness over the situation was not general
throughout the countries.

Then came the war and its cataclysms. Latin America
suffered, economically, with the rest and in many ways en-
dured more than some other parts of the neutral world.
It found, in the first few months and years of the conflict in
Europe, multiplying new markets for its raw materials, arid
money poured in. Then, with restricted shipping, greater
danger on the long journeys, and more and more self-suffi-
ciency in Europe and North America, fewer and fewer ships

The End of Four Centuries of Exploitation 37

came to carry away any goods save war supplies. Before
the war ended, Latin America was suffering in the paral-
ysis of all normal functioning of world commerce. The
bitter lesson of the producer of raw materials was driven
home once more, that no one will buy unless there is eco-
nomic necessity, and will not sell unless it is easy and very
profitable to do so.

In the wake of the war came the wild scramble for the
Latin American market, along with the other markets that
had been neglected so long by every manufacturing nation
of the world. Latin America, like most of the rest of civili-
zation, had bought freely from the United States on the
own terms of the North American manufacturers in
the early war years and when the war ended the North
Americans, with the rest, plunged into export with the em-
phasis on Latin American trade. The result is known well
by everyone who joined in that glorious dumping party.
Latin American merchants ordered or allowed themselves to
be sold immense bills of goods, often many times what they
wanted^ or could use, for they had been used to over-order-
ing and getting but a fraction of their orders, again like the
rest of the world. And when those goods came to port, all
of them as ordered and on time or ahead of time (for the
factories were geared to tremendous production), the Latin
Americans left them on the docks and in the warehouses,
because there was not enough money to pay for them, or
enough customers to buy them if they were taken on any
terms.

Adjustment came, as adjustment will, and in the eight
years which followed the trade of Latin America swung to
its highest peak, loans reached figures that would not have
been believed possible before the war, and there began a
sane, solid, normal growth that, despite the temporary set-

38 Greater America

backs following 1929, leads to distances and to opportunities
not easy to envision conservatively. But through all this de-
velopment has run and will run the grim determination
that whatever 1 is done shall be done for the building of the
economic autonomy, the independence of the Latin Amer-
icans.

To this end the commerce itself of recent years has
tended. Industrial machinery has become an increasingly
larger proportion of the imports machines that have built
and are building the "plant" for that economic self-suffi-
ciency. Less and less have imports been the rougher goods
of primitive people those, where needed, are being made
at home. The imports and exports, increasing in volume,
have begun to include increasingly the exchange of com-
modities between prosperous communities which is the
modern development of the old free-trade idea. It is no
longer free, for it is exchange and the seeking of markets
and the seeking, too, of goods to tempt the studied purchases
of people en route to wealth and prosperity.

Thus Latin America has emerged from the years of its
slow development into a modern era in which the first
steps have only now been taken. A tremendous area is yet
to be reclaimed, a growing and varied people are yet to be
given the opportunities from which for four centuries they
have been shut off, and a commerce is to be built that will
mean much to human comfort and progress there, and will
give much to the world which has waited so long for its
development.

Chapter III
THE AREAS TO BE RECLAIMED

LATIN America stretches through ninety degrees of latitude,
and ninety degrees of longitude, a quarter of the way
around the world, east and west, and half the distance from
pole to pole, north and south. Its toal area, for twenty
countries, is about 8,500,000 square miles; its population is
approximately 120,000,000. That is 15 per cent of the land
area, of the globe and about 6 per cent of the 'world's popu-
lation. Only Australia, outside the polar regions, has a
smaller continental population in proportion to area. Asia
has about twice the area and over eight times the popula-
tion, that is, sixteen times the proportional population, as
compared with Latin America. Yet this vast expanse is not
a desert wilderness, but a continent blessed with the exuber-
ance of the Tropics in about four-fifths of its area, and
one of the most productive sections (potentially) of the
north or south temperate zone) in the other quarter.

In this area twenty independent republics now exist.
They range from Brazil's 3,275,000 square miles with 40,-
000,000 estimated population to Haiti's 10,200 square miles
and 2,300,000 people or, amongst the continental countries,
to El Salvador's 13,176 square miles and 1,650,000 inhabi-
tants the two latter densities of population being compar-
able to that of Czechoslovakia. The countries range in civ-
ilization and modern progress from the finished product of
transplanted European culture in Buenos Aires to the coco-
chewing Indians of the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, a people
starved with hardship and stupefied by their drug.^ In other
words, a continent stupendous in area, appalling in the ga-

39

4 Greater America

muts run by the contrasts amongst its nations and its peoples.

This great region has undergone an irregular develop-
ment through the four centuries since it was opened by the
Spanish and Portuguese explorers. That development has
been influenced by myriad factors of prime importance
which have developed in the struggle of man and Nature
over its vast distances. The almost superhuman achieve-
ments of the conquerors and of those who came after them,
in exploration as well as in war, have proven in a hundred
fields that these men from the south of Europe met great
difficulties with all the hardihood and all the genius for
conquest of the greatest of the pioneers of the northern
section of the hemisphere. They worked through the same
years, and through the same or more bitter difficulties in the
geography and climates they encountered. Yet Hernan
Cortes conquered Mexico with 600 soldiers. Francisco Pi-
zarro overturned the powerful Inca empire of Peru with a
literal handful of Spaniards behind him. Pedro de Alvar-
ado hacked his way through 500 miles of mountains and
jungle from Mexico to conquer Guatemala. Spanish (and
English) adventurers scaled the Andes of Colombia, Vene-
zuela and Guiana in search of the "Gilded King" an ad-
venture in which Sir Walter Raleigh met his fatal disgrace.

In the days of the revolutions this same strain of Spanish
blood in the person of Simon Bolivar led the tatterdemalion
rabble of his army from the steaming plains of the Orinoco
across the freezing Andes and down a thousand miles of its
prodigious valleys to defeat the last remnants of the Spanish
army in highland battles in Peru. In that same era, too,
Spanish genius and Spanish planning prepared one of the
most remarkable campaigns in military history, when Jose
de San Martin led his army across the Andes in the south,
from Mendoza in Argentina to battle with and defeat the

The Areas to Be Beclaimed 41

Spanish power in Chile, making the passage of the Andes
without the loss of a horse or a mule or a man, as the
record on his beautiful monument at Mendoza proudly re-
lates.

Thus the battles against the Spaniards were fought with
the forces of Nature seemingly seeking to thwart the revolu-
tionists, a symbol of the mighty problem of the conquering
and taming of forest, desert and mountain which is one of
the recurring and tremendous themes of Latin American
history. The contribution of the men of these new nations
will recur again and again in this book. The unfriendly
elements which these men have met and meet today will in
later pages, perhaps, seem to take secondary place, but al-
ways throughout every study of Latin America looms over-
whelmingly the nature of the land in which their people
dwell and work.

The Western Hemisphere is a double spiral linked, like a
figure 8, east or west as your finger turns or as the trade
winds blow, but always north and south. You may go al-
most directly south from the east coast of North America to
the west coast of South America, or in the reverse direc-
tion and with other goals, with a wider swing to east or
west, but ever north and south between the two. The air-
plane has shown this unity, for there are no prevailing
headwinds whirling about a spinning world on the north-
south lanes, and intercontinental air traffic over vaster dis-
tances than the "great circles" of the North Atlantic was
a practicable and profitable reality within two years of the
first exploratory flights. Radio, because night and day are
the same throughout the Americas, links the cities of both
continents without diffusion or distortion and in the bond
of common talk and common music. The ship lanes are

42 Greater America

plied easily and safely and the reversed seasons of North
and South but cement a commercial relationship that in-
evitably must make the common carriers of the sea swift
and profitable, with mightier leviathans, generations hence,
than plow the North Atlantic. The long stretches of the
continents have challenged railway builders for a century
and highway makers for a decade; both will some day, from
a distant Olympus, see their dreams materialized beyond
their maddest flights of fancy.

In the heart of the world betwen the two lobes of the
hemisphere lies one of those regions which, since men first
went out upon the oceans in ships, have determined history
and human development, a great sea lying between the
nations. The Caribbean has been compared in phrase and
metaphor to the Mediterranean, although it has only to a
limited degree the geographical characteristics of the Mare
Nostrum of classic history. Yet its effect, less obvious, on
the strategy of the world of today and on the relations of
the nations which fringe it and lie beyond it, north and
south, has been tremendous. Its military importance, since
the construction of the Panama Canal, has been multiplied
a hundredfold and has swayed the sea power of the United
States and of England. The effect of the Caribbean on
the Latin American policy of the United States has long
been in the nature of a determinant, outside of choice, of
many of its major decisions in foreign relations. But aside
from all these the physical Caribbean itself has had, and as
the Panama Canal's outlet to the Atlantic, now has, a yet
greater influence on the destiny of the Americas.

In appearance a division, the Caribbean Sea is in reality
the greatest of the links between North and South America.
South of it lie unexplored, almost impenetrable, mountains

The Areas to Be Reclaimed 43

and the vast lowlands of the Amazon basin, yet because of
the Caribbean, populous nations full of promise and
achievement rim the northern edge of South America. Be-
cause of it, the fringing civilizations of northern South
America are in communication with all the world, by cross-
ing steamship lines and by sea planes which coast the land
with a security that flying above the jungle can not yet give.
The Panama Canal has turned the Caribbean into a cross-
roads, and has, with the Caribbean, brought the West Coast
of South America until 1914 the most distant from "civ-
ilization" of all the inhabited regions of the globe within
a relatively short sail, and much briefer flying, from New
York and Montreal.

All of Latin America, not even excepting these storied
regionsi of the Caribbean and the valley of the Amazon in
Brazil, hangs dangling upon the rocky backbone of the
Western Hemisphere, that chain of mountains which is
known as the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United
States, as the Central Range or Cordillera in Mexico and
Central America, and as the Andes in South America.
Every physical characteristic, even the Amazon and the
plains of Argentina, seem appendages of that vast chain of
mountains which by its convolutions (and with its eastern
spur that lies across the northern edge of South America)
was perhaps the physical cause even of the Caribbean Sea.
The Amazon, to carry the metaphor further, was doubtless
once only a vast ocean gulf between the main range of the
Andes and that eastern spur which dominates Colombia and
is the background of Venezuela and the Guianas. The rivers
which are now the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Parana, the
Paraguay and the Rio de la Plata were once coursing
mountain streams scouring the sides of the Andes, and

44 Greater America

carrying their rock and silt outward to fill vast ocean gulfs
to make the tropic jungles and the "chaco" of the North
and the flat plains of the Argentine pampas in the South.
To this day the outpouring mud of the Amazon yellows the
Atlantic for two hundred miles beyond its mouth, and it
was this immense volume of fresh water and of silt which
made the early voyagers realize that they were skirting a
mighty continent and not an archipelago. The Rio de la
Plata, the aoo-mile wide estuary on which face Argentina
and Uruguay (and Buenos Aires and Montevideo, their
capitals, 125 miles apart across the river) is no "river of
silver" as its name implies, but a muddy stream carrying the
washings of vast areas and gleaming in silver reflection only
in the slanting rays of the rising or setting sun.

Mountains are the dominating element iix the geography
and in the life of Mexico. Two ranges, the one a continua-
tion of the Rocky mountains on the West, the other ap-
parently a recrudescent spur of the Alleghanies on the East,
converge upon the great central valley in which lies the
City of Mexico at an altitude of nearly 8,000 feet above the
sea. The plateau between these ranges is desert-like in the
North, but in the South and in its extensions toward the
Pacific it is rich and fertile. Here the centuries of Indian,
Spanish and modern Mexican history have been unrolled,
here has been the chief source of the food supplies of the
inhabitants, and in the surrounding mountains have lain
Mexico's historic wealth of gold, silver, copper and other
minerals.

Tradition has it and the ruins in the southern states of
Mexico and in Central America carry conclusive evidence
that the succeeding civilizations of Mexico as of Central
America came originally, in waves, from the cultural center

The Areas to Be Reclaimed 45

of the Mayas in Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatan, Guatemala
and Honduras. Driven out by plagues, famine and chang-
ing climates, the ancient dynasties emigrated to the high-
lands, but the jungle lowlands, with petroleum and with
certain possibilities for agriculture, have remained an im-
portant section of the country, albeit overshadowed always
by the hills. Indeed the valleys reaching down from the
snow-capped volcanoes of the central plateau toward Vera
Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico have long been rich producers
of both tropical foodstuffs and specialties and of corn and
beans, the staple foods of the Americas. But Mexico is of
the mountains, and must always be, and he who would un-
derstand Mexico must know the people of the hills, and
the domination which they have exercised through all
Mexican history on the government, the economics and the
very thinking of the masses of both highland and lowland.

Central America is a country of contrasting nations, tiny
though they be, alternately highland and lowland. Each
has its low coast country and its high country. Guatemala,
Honduras and Costa Rica have given their eastern coast
over to bananas, a producer of wealth and prosperity, but
the life of the country itself is in the hills. El Salvador is a
tropical garden, intensively cultivated, and lying along the
lowlands of the Pacific, but with the mountains shutting it
in, protecting it, giving it contrast, too, with its neighbors.
Nicaragua, spreading across the continent, again lives
chiefly in the lowland country of the Pacific, on the shores of
its two great lakes. The eastern coast is but little developed,
and the mountains are a wilderness with a few coffee planta-
tions on the lower slopes, and a small mining development.
Costa Rica, living in the heights, has raised up its Spanish
race unadulterated, and in the relatively cooler regions of

46 Greater America

the altitudes is prospering and producing, too. Panama, the
site of the great canal, owes its power and importance to the
fact that the backbone of the Rocky-Andean chain dips at
the isthmus to its lowest spot in the length of the two con-
tinents; mountains, by their absence, are its power and its
great reason for existence.

The Andes of South America flow southward from
Panama in an ever-rising chain, spreading into two ranges,
east and west, and a narrow highland plain, about 13,000
feet above the sea, between. The long eastern spur reaches
through Colombia and Venezuela and, in the deeply wooded
hills of the Guiana jungles, almost to the Atlantic. It is
cut, however, by the Orinoco (itself one of the world's
mightiest river systems) which on its part has taken from
the mountains the earth and sand with which to fill the
limitless flat lowlands which the Venezuelans call "lo$
llanos" the plains. The llanos are the most famous phy-
sical characteristic of Venezuela but, again, the eastern spur
of the Andes dominates the life of Venezuela. They lie,
frowning and repelling, along the southern length of the
country and, sharply raising the land to a plateau on the
northern edge, lift lovely Caracas, the capital, 3,000 feet
above the cloud-swept Caribbean, less than twenty-five miles
away. Further west the mountains form Lake Maracaibo
in a mountain-locked basin of brackish water connected
with the sea, into which the island of Porto Rico could be
dropped without touching the edges of the lake. These
mountains are Venezuela, and determine the life of Vene-
zuela. They have imprisoned its petroleum, on their slopes
its coffee is grown, and in the highland valleys its cattle
prosper. Venezuela, in its mountain cradle, waits surely,

The Areas to Be Eeclaimed 47

indeed, for a development to which its characteristics will
contribute, not detract.

Colombia is a series of massive knots of mountains, with
lovely valleys between, "savannahs" richly cultivated where
there are people to need their produce, and some of them
raising, now, crops of coffee and sugar and cattle to be
shipped abroad as communications come. The riches of
Colombia, mineral and agricultural, challenge the hack-
neyed phrase that they "have not been scratched." A, vague
realization of those potentialities (and of the practical and
financial difficulties of development in those tumbled,
mighty regions) permeates the country and the people.
Valleys, leagues long, hundreds of leagues indeed (a league
is the distance man or beast can travel at a good walk in an
hour, that is, three to four miles) are locked away and yet,
where they have been developed, are actually garden homes
for happy colonies. Each has a cash crop of some sort, or
else a mining venture that yields money but essentially it
is a land where a living can be taken easily from the soil,
room for the world's crowded millions. It is, too, a field for
civilization and progress in varied directions of industry,
mining and specialized agriculture. Beyond the crests of
the Andes lies an immense area of Colombia partially
within the Amazon basin and partially within that of the
Rio Apure, one of the headwaters of the Orinoco. Today
they are a wilderness, where no man travels and only a few
Indians make their homes in huts or under the forest can-
opy of the jungle.

Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia (the high Andean republics) have
much in common, and vast divergences. Ecuador, its capi-
tal Quito high in the mountains lying across the equatorial

48 Greater America

line, has lowland plantations of cacao or chocolate and high-
lands peopled by strange, gentle Indians, with little indus-
tries like the making of Panama hats, and a native agricul-
ture. A bursting crown of mountains is Ecuador, its very
life dominated by the heights. The coastal plain and the low-
land valleys which penetrate a little into the interior are
only a portion of its area but by far the most productive,
with cacao and petroleum the chief exports.

Peru, with a narrow coastal plain intensively cultivated for
untold centuries, through elaborate irrigation works which
follow the hillsides in terraced gardens far into the moun-
tains, is dominated, again and forever, by those frowning
crags. Two mighty railways conquer the Andes of Peru,
railways built in the flood days of Peru's wealth, in the third
quarter of the last century, by Henry Meiggs. Meiggs was
a North American engineer with the vision of a Cecil
Rhodes and, fortunately for his dreams, the limitless purse
strings of Peru's fertilizer revenue and of the investments
of the avaricious British public (so like the avid North
American public of seventy years later, in other Latin
American investments). Peru, with the development of
modern irrigation, well started after the new flow of in-
vestment began, developed sugar and cotton industries to
supplement the mineral wealth of petroleum from the coast
and of copper, vanadium, silver and gold from the moun-
tains only a part of the immense variety of Peru's mineral
wealth. That apparently sound economic balance failed in
the crisis of 1930, but its potentialities remained unimpaired
and the proof of the possibilities of such sound economic
balance in Latin America stand out like a sun of promise in
the midst of the slowness of so many other developments.

Beyond the first range of the mountains lies the long, nar-
row, inter-Andean plain, stretching from Ecuador through

The Areas to Be Reclaimed 49

Peru and Bolivia to the Andes of Chile, where it disappears
into the crags. Here sheep have been raised for four hun-
dred years and, within the few years that have elapsed since
the World war, the inbred descendants of the sheep the
Spaniards brought in the Sixteenth Century have been bred
up successfully to the production of meat and wool compar-
able to the best of their types in the world. Again beyond
the mountains, with their sheep and their mineral wealth,
lies the eastern slope of the Andes, the montana or forested
region that contrasts sharply with the barren wastes of the
western slope where irrigation alone will produce crops.

On this eastern slope of the Andes lies a new future for
South America, a world unknown and unguessed to the
casual traveler, but homes for hundreds of thousands of
white men (or yellow, if we allow them), balmy beneath
the tropic sun but high enough to be free from its draw-
backs. The mountains, again, dominating in threatening
glory yet offering the riches and beauties of the slopes be-
yond those menacing heights.

And so on to Bolivia, the source of untold treasure of sil-
ver and of gold in the days of Spanish rule and today, from
the abandoned silver mines, of tin enough to supply the
world. Bolivia lies in the mountains, away from the sea-
coast. Here the inter-Andean plain seems, to the traveler,
the heart of the country, but its loveliest cities and its
most charming and prosperous life lie again on the eastern
slope of the Andes, in that montana which is a large part of
the promise of Bolivia, as of Peru. Beyond the montana
lies the Chaco, a wilderness of swamps and rough grasses
and "scrub" forests, a region whose future has yet to be
solved, both politically and in its economic development.
Paraguay hasi built a nation on a portion of the Chaco area,
but Bolivia has done only a little toward reclaiming its

50 Greater America

share. Petroleum undoubtedly exists there, and will be ex-
ploited for the benefit of the world in that (at the moment)
distant time when other more accessible supplies shall have
been exhausted. Bolivia, indeed, is in so many ways literally
the last of the unopened treasure-houses of the world. No
man can guess all that it really contains, but the casket is
richly encrusted, and the surety of its service when the need
comes, and when South America is actually opened, is be-
yond question.

Chile, with its intense, active people, its strange geography
(it is 2,600 miles long and averages no miles wide) is in-
deed of the mountains. At almost no spot in the length of
the country are the Andes out of sight, and nowhere are
they out of thought. The short, stormy rivers of the rainy
season, the vast and forbidding nitrate and borax deserts of
the North, are of the mountains first of all, and in the South
the broad valley that lies between the low coastal range
and the Andes is lovely beyond description, because it is a
mountain valley of low altitude, and in the temperate zone.
For in Chile the world is again our world, of winter and
summer and lovely spring and gorgeous autumn, and the
richest part of Chile, where the chief port and the capital
are located, is in that fertile central valley. To the south,
the lakes and mountains of Switzerland and the fiords of
Norway are duplicated and even surpassed in beauty and in
size. In Chile the highest mountains of the Americas are
located, and the mightiest fiord, the long inland sea that
leads, with but a single break, beneath glaciers and tower-
ing pine forests southward to Chilean Patagonia and the
sheep herds of the South.

The nitrate fields which are Chile's chief exportable
wealth are in the North, in the deserts which were perhaps

The Areas to Be Reclaimed 5 1

once the deltas of ancient rivers while in, the North, and in
the central regions also, are rich copper deposits, elsewhere
iron and also coal, all, save the coal (which shelves out under
the Pacific in mines worked beneath the ocean floor) the
product of the mountains.

Beyond the Andes of Chile lies Argentina, where the
mountains disappear as the dominating factor of the life
and thought of the people. The mountain provinces of Ar-
gentina are poor and their people few, but from those
mountains will perhaps come, in the course of the material
development of the country, the electric power to move its
mills and modernize its great farms. The pampa which
stretches eastward like a gently sloping floor in this un-
like the rolling prairies which characterize the wheat lands
of North America are the cattle ranges, the vineyards
(near the mountains) the corn and the wheat and the flax
lands. In the North are the sugar and cotton fields, closer
to the Tropics, and throughout the length of Argentina are
potentialities well begun, but as yet only begun, to be de-
veloped.

Argentina's unfoldment is the story of the conquering of
the feaf and prejudice that held its people close to the great
cities and the seacoast, and of a system of land tenure in-
herited from the Spaniards which is as yet not greatly
changed. Yet because it must be changed inevitably, it
makes the surer the promise that the development of this
rich region has only started. It is only yesterday, in the
memory of older men, that the cry was raised for the re-
claiming of the "15,000 leagues" (a square league is nine to
sixteen square miles so that is a magnificent area) of the
pampa which is now one of the most productive areas of
the Argentine countryside. Year by year, the reclaiming

5 2 Greater America

of the West of the United States is paralleled in Argentina
with the exception that, with modern methods and mod-
ern transportation, the speed of the achievement of the re-
demption of the rich, unfilled regions in Argentina is in-
finitely faster than in our own western history.

To hurry on, then, with our picture. Paraguay is of the
mountains, again, its hardihood (if not its wealth) being
built on the struggle which its pioneers and their descend-
ants waged with the Chaco, the flattened, swampy skirt of
the Andes. Here they have built a nation and pushed back
and back the domination of the wilderness, now by their
own prowess, now by the closer adaptation of the native
Guarani Indians into the national life, again by the impor-
tation of foreign colonies, but always with the legacy of
the mountains, that Grand Chaco, dominating the life of the
country. Yet the packing of meat and the shipping of hides
and dyewood and herbs has been a growing industry, and
if the last frontier that will remain, half a century hence in
South America, is to be Paraguay, it will yet be a virile
frontier, and with much to contribute, of its own self, to
our civilization.

Uruguay, occupying its (relatively) limited area on the
Atlantic coast, between the national giants of Argentina
and Brazil, is a land of rolling fields and gentle hills, far in-
deed from the mighty Andes, hills which need never have
existed so far as any physical characteristic within Uruguay
itself is concerned. Yet around and before its doors rolls
the mighty majesty of the Rio de la Plata, with its yellow
freight of silt from the distant mountains and the valleys
of its great tributaries, a reminder continually of the con-
tinent that lies behind, and of the mountains that rise to
their lonely snows a thousand miles away.

The Areas to Be Eeclaimed 53

Brazil is characterized not alone by the great Amazon
valley which perhaps owes its origin to its confinement
within the shelter of the Andes and its eastern spur, but by
highlands rising along the coast and extending for sev-
eral hundred miles into the interior until they are cut
off by tributaries of the Amazon. This range of moun-
tains and plateaux seems to have no apparent connection
with any but the hills of Uruguay, which are related to it,
rather than the Brazilian highlands to the southern hills.
It furnishes one of the outstanding features of the country,
for here are located the rich temperate zone farm and graz-
ing lands of Southern Brazil

The foundations of the unestimated mining wealth of the
country (beyond doubt excelled in variety and extent only
by the United States, as a national area) were laid aeons ago
in these same coastal mountain ranges. Brazil's dazzling
and confusing history and the prodigality of its gifts come
in large part from the fantastic nature of the country and,
too, from the splendor of the settings of its cities, from Rio
de Janeiro's matchless harbor and crowning hills to the
superb sweep of the harbor of Para which is actually the
mouth of the Amazon. For Brazil is a country of cities,
and urban life has developed further, there, than in most
of the other countries of Latin America. This has been
influenced in part by the geography of the country and its
vast distances, making various centers imperative, but a con-
dition, also, which has had its influence in turn on the di-
rection of Brazilian growth and of Brazilian problems.

Of the Antilles, only a word. They are certainly, as a
look at the map will show, the remnants of a spur of land
that once circled and perhaps enclosed the Caribbean Sea.
Colonies of Great Britain, Holland and France (which

54 Greater America

hold, each of them, also a continental foothold in the Gui-
anas, north of Brazil and east of Venezeula) dot the lesser
Antilles. The United States holds the Virgin Islands and
Porto Rico, and Great Britain has Jamaica, the Bahamas,
Trinidad and Barbadoes and some of the smaller islands
classified as the Lesser Antilles. Holland holds the famous
old pirate stronghold now the stronghold of Royal Dutch
Shell Oil Curasao, and other less important islands ofj
the coast of Venezuela, as well as Dutch Guiana. A tropical
fecundity of the soil (where sharp coral has not had first
call on geology) once made many of these islands precious
as sources of sugar, and their romantic history of pirates
and buccaneers is hardly approached by any other spots in
the New World,

Cuba rules as queen of the empire of sugar, now a some-
what dubious crown, although hardly more than a hundred
years ago France preferred to let England take Canada
rather than lose the small sugar island of Martinique!
Cuba, and the two young nations which now share the
island of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the black,
French-speaking republic of Haiti, constitute all of Latin
America in the West Indies today. Mountains and tropical
profusion share the islands, gems upon the breast of the
loveliest and most capricious of all the seas of the world.
As a chain, the Antilles form a spinal column about the
strategic Caribbean, for a string of mines laid between them
would make its approaches difficult except under the guns
of the power that holds Florida, the naval base at Guan-
tanamo Bay in Cuba, Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands, ly-
ing beside and commanding the three great straits of entry
into the Caribbean,

In the years that have followed the independence of the

The Areas to Be Reclaimed 55

nations of the Western world, from 1776 in the United
States to 1898 in Cuba and to the evolution of Canada into
a self-governing dominion, there has been unfolding on this
hemisphere one of history's most striking records of man's
harnessing of the physical forces of his environment.
Change, and progress forward, have become commonplaces,
and if the material development of the United States and of
Canada has perforce crowded other actors out of the center
of the world's stage, there are but few of the nations of the
Western Hemisphere which have not recorded a similar if
less spectacular development.

Argentina has grown from a gangling boy to fullest man-
hood, its economic life from the wild routine of the un-
populated pampas, where its wild cattle were raised and
killed for their hides alone, into the producer of a huge por-
tion of the world's finest meat and of millions of bushels of
its wheat, and is today moving toward an industrial devel-
opment which already promises much for its commercial
and social progress. Cuba and Mexico have gained their
places in the economy of the world, first in specialized crops
and minerals and today in an increasingly rounded eco-
nomic life which with growing manufacture places them
in the forefront of international importance for the next
decade. Venezuela has harnessed its capacities and re-
sources to an intensive national development. Colombia is
in an era of specialized progress in a dozen lines, and the
opening of her rich interior is at hand. The Andean repub-
lics of the West Coast and the countries of Central America,
still feeling their way, are yet becoming more and more a
conscious part of the world we know and upon which we
depend. Chile is proudly developing natural resources and,
along with them, intensive manufacturing in new lines, for
its own and the world's advantage. Brazil, the empire

56 Greater America

whose map is not yet half but rather a tenth unrolled, has
met economic crises that would have swamped far older
nations of Europe, and met them successfully through the
very force of its will and the might of its potential re-
sources.

The vitally important subject of climate is discussed in
later pages, but it forms also one of the stones, although
not the keystone, of the arch of the geographical founda-
tion on which this lower story, so to speak, of our structure
rests.

Latin America's vast distances, north and south, carry it
through the north temperate zone (in a portion of northern
Mexico and Cuba) through the full breadth of the torrid
zone and through the south temperate zone in Uruguay,
Argentina and Chile. By far the larger portion of the area
lies in the Tropics and it is for this logical reason that we
have come to think of Latin America as tropical. But the
altitudes at which some sections of many of the countries
lie, as we have seen in preceding pages, give characteristics
close to those of the temperate zone to vast and important
areas that are geographically in the torrid zone. At 5,000
feet above sea level in the Tropics, although there is no
frost or snow, wheat can be grown and temperate zone
crops thrive. At such an altitude, and above it, men live in
comfort and work with energy and precision, after the man-
ner of dwellers in the temperate zones, as contrasted with
the traditional lassitude of the inhabitants of the Tropics.
These heights are generally fairly well populated and some
of the finest cities lie there. These plateaux, in addition,
certainly offer the greatest opportunity in Latin America
for the expansion of the areas available to the white races
of the world.

The Areas to Be Reclaimed 57

These highland regions have drawbacks, of course, and
some of the most definite of them are the absence of frost
and likewise of summer heat, the endless succession of
spring-like days taking its own toll from the energy of the
residents, but the relief of the summer heat of the Tropics
or of the cold of winter heights is always close at hand, just
over the mountain passes, to the dwellers in such lovely val-
leys as those of Mexico, Guatemala, Bogota, Quito and La
Paz. The whole subject of climate, and the comparative
value of the various theories of its direct effect on the civi-
lization of Latin America was discussed at some length in
the author's early book, "The People of Mexico."

A word must be recorded here, also, of the toll which dis-
ease, and in particular yellow fever and malaria, exacted
from the countries of Latin America in years gone by, and
how hookworm is still a bitter curse in the hot countries.

Until yellow fever, and to a large extent the pernicious
forms of malaria, were eradicated following the discovery
of the part played by the mosquito in their propagation, life
in the hot countries was a continual nightmare to newcom-
ers and even to the natives who survived the periodical
onslaughts of what they feelingly called "those fierce beasts,"
the mosquitoes. The Panama Canal was built, after the
French had failed, by engineers and by doctors from the
United States, and the great part played by the sanitary
corps in drying: up or coating with oil every pool where
mosquitoes could breed is one of the great romances of san-
itation. Whatever may be one's own feelings regarding
these diseases, all glory must go to those who have con-
quered them for the many who suffered and who paid with
their lives for their ignorance.

Today every pest-hole in Latin America has been cleared
of yellow fever. Pernicious malaria is becoming less and

58 Greater America

less common, and its periodical attacks and its enervating
wasting of the system have ceased to be a commonplace.
Typhus and typhoid no longer scourge the cities, and mod-
ern sanitation, including chlorination of drinking water and
the use of harmless little fish in the water urns to consume
the mosquito larvae if they are laid there, have become ac-
cepted standards throughout all the ancient plague spots of
the American Tropics.

There will be many words in the pages that follow re-
garding the part that modern engineering has played and is
yet to play in the development of these countries. Machin-
ery and transportation have conquered many of their handi-
caps, but in this question of climate one factor, of which
more indeed anon, stands supreme. Mechanical refrigera-
tion must never be forgotten in any record of the conquer-
ing of the Tropics. The ice-making machine of years ago,
the private automatic refrigerator of today and the artificial
conditioning and cooling of air in every theatre, public build-
ing and home in the future, have made the problem of the
climatic hostilities of the Tropics largely an issue of the
past. This statement is true in degree today; it will be im-
measurably truer a quarter of a century from now.

Such is Latin America today. There remain still im-
mense distances to be conquered. The Amazon valley is as
yet virtually unknown, beyond the barest facts and a world
of legends, and it is the prototype of what is yet to be
learned in every section. Today you must travel over im-
mense distances in Latin America by mule-back, perhaps
the most expensive, mile for mile, but certainly not the
least interesting mode of travel. Yet into the most distant
wildernesses; men have already flown their airplanes in a
single decade of progress. They have driven their steel rails

-The Areas to Be Reclaimed 59

time may yet repay the investors who made them pos-
sible into regions whose wealth and opportunities the
world needs. They have opened an empire half of whose
problems have been solved by those mad enterprises in
which we of today share where those who built them only
built and spent and died. Yet as a whole Latin America is
blessed with communication systems of importance and
value, and adequate far beyond those which pioneers in
other lands, in similar stages of development, have been able
to enjoy. While perhaps the most important factor in the
evaluation of Latin America of the past is its geography and
in estimating its possibilities of the future is its communica-
tions, these form the background and are built to serve, the
one or the other, the human power that comes down to us
from a distant past and from an unmeasured present moves
forward to its vital role in the future of all the Americas.

Chapter IV
THE COMING OF POPULATIONS

No one knows how many Indians were living in the wilder-
nesses of Latin America when the Spaniards and Portuguese
came. The figures of baptisms (the only statistics) are fan-
tastic six million Indian converts in the Valley of Mexico
alone can best be accounted for by the natives' desire to
please the strange white men by being baptised as often as
they were told to accept the rite. Few other figures are
available, and the much quoted estimates of Baron von
Humboldt are based on local reports and church records,
and are frankly, moreover, estimates and traditions except
for the closing years of the colonial regime, the last of the
Eighteenth and the first of the Nineteenth Century, when
Humboldt made his famous studies.

There had unquestionably been great civilizations at va-
rious points in the Western Hemisphere. The Mayan-Aztec
center in Mexico and Central America harbored at some
time (probably about 1,000 A.D. as a mean) a huge popu-
lation which ultimately was decimated through plague or
famine. At the time of the conquest of Mexico the actual
Mayan center in Yucatan and Central America was of small
proportions, while the Aztec empire around the present City
of Mexico was close to its prime. In South America, in the
highlands of Peru, there was unquestionably a vast popula-
tion at some era, the time for which can hardly be set al-
though certainly the zenith was long prior to the Spanish
Conquest. The elaborate irrigation works whose ruins still
survive on the hillsides of the valleys of Peru and Bolivia

indicate a long and bitter struggle with famine, a struggle

60

The Coming of Populations 61

which was being steadily lost when the Spaniards under
Pizarro came to add their horrors of war and forced labor
to break the race remaining. There was probably a center
in Brazil, and certainly the legends as to the wealth and
civilization of the Chibchas, which drew many doughty ad-
venturers to the highlands of northern South America, were
not entirely without foundation, as ruins that are only par-
tially explored tend definitely to prove.

But the Indians whom the Spaniards and Portuguese
found were to contribute and have contributed a quantity
of their blood and strength which cannot now be calculated
in the living inhabitants any more than their early numbers
can be estimated. Throughout the peoples of all the coun-
tries of Latin America, excepting those of Argentina, Uru-
guay and Chile and the upper classes in all the countries, the
Indian strain recurs and crops out as an accepted sign, al-
though unjustly, of the Latin American racial type.

With this, in the islands of the Caribbean and in the
lands which skirt it, and southward through all of Brazil
(thinning out toward the South) the Negra has contributed
an immense proportion of the blood of the peoples of today.
Those brought from Africa to take the places of the In-
dians who died in their slavery or forced labor (or to sup-
plant the aborigines in the vain efforts to save them led by
Bartolomeo de las Casas, the "Protector of the Indians")
entered into the basic stock of the peoples of the Caribbean
countries. It is there today and, some anthropologists say, is
becoming an increasing factor (owing to its greater vital
force) not only in the islands and in the mainlands of the
Latin Caribbean, but also in the southern states of the
United States.

Yet Latin America belongs, by every standard that we
can judge, to the Ayrian civilization. It is white and mixed

62 Greater America

blood tending in culture and in progress toward the stand-
ards of white and, as we shall see more and more in these
pages, of a truly American, civilization. Brazil, Mexico,
Guatemala, Peru and Bolivia have large Indian populations,
and problems of administration corresponding thereto. Yet
this cannot be allowed to obscure our vision, or to warp our
appreciation of the tendencies and achievements of the
white populations of all of the former Spanish and Portu-
guese colonies. Of the estimated 120,000,000 people in Latin
America, fully two-thirds are Spanish or Portuguese, or
these strains mixed with, but predominating over, the In-
dian. Perhaps 20,000,000 outside Brazil are Indian, in race
and culture a generous estimate. Negroes number per-
haps 10,000,000.

Few conquering races have ever achieved their conquests
so completely as Spain and, to a lesser but still notable de-
gree, Portugal achieved theirs in the New World. The con-
quering hordes of the past, even those of Ghengis Khan, left
only their racial mark on their victims and their Mongol
or Hunnish traits in their descendants for a few generations.
Spain's mark has persisted for four centuries in race, lan-
guage, and government, and in the culture, the religion and
the thinking of hundreds of millions of their mixed as well
as pure-blood descendants. It is estimated that less than
half a million Spaniards actually settled permanently in the
New World in the four centuries of Colonial rule, and the
larger proportion of those went to Mexico. They mixed
with complete freedom with the Indians, encouraged by the
priests who in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, as in
French Canada, approved the marriages of white with In-
dian and Negro, for the good of the souls of the offspring
and for the propagation of the faith. There were no Span-

The Coming of Populations 63

ish or Portuguese women in the hordes that flocked under
the standards of the conquerors, and comparatively few
women amongst those who went, in the succeeding centur-
ies, to administer. Indeed, unmarried Spanish women were
not allowed to go to the colonies, and only those whom the
colonials married and took with them, and their daughters
born in the colonies, furnished the essential feminine ele-
ments of the pure stock. It is the blood of these few and
now forgotten wives which alone runs pure in the strains
that go back to the officers of the conquest and of viceregal
days, and form the bases for the pure-blood aristocrats of to-
day. Yet, although it is a just generalization to state that
Indian and Negro blood did not enter the white line
through the Spanish or Portuguese women, there were a
few notable exceptions, in Mexico in particular, where for
the sake of the faith, and at the urging of the king, Spanish
women did marry with Indian princes and thus bring into
the Spanish line the indigenous blood which shows itself
now and again in the proudest white families.

The Spanish colonial society was, however, definitely or-
ganized along racial lines. In Mexico, where the caste sys-
tem was raised to its highest efficiency, the colonial society
was organized into first the peninsulares, or Spaniards from
Spain (the "peninsula") second, the castes, including the
native-born whites and all the mixtures of Spaniards and
Indians and Negroes, third the Indians, and fourth the
Negroes. The castes in Mexico were as follows, in the degree
of their rank; cridlos (creoles), children of Spanish men and
Spanish women born in the colonies; mestizos, children of
Spaniard and Indian; castizos, children of Spaniard and
mestizo; cspanoles, children of Spaniard and castizo;
mtdattoes, children of Spaniard and Negro; moriscos

64 Greater America

(Moors), children of Spaniard and mulatto; zambos, chil-
dren of Indian and Negro.

There were definite political and educational restrictions
paralleling the caste system, and the sharp divisions which
still exist between the high and the low in most countries of
Latin America traced their origin back to colonial times. The
mestizo, an embryonic middle class in the colonial era, came
into political power with the revolutions, and for all the
century since there has been a continual struggle, although
sometimes not admitted as such, between this group and the
white aristocracy. Under the regimes of peace and progress,
whether under the dictators or in mestizo democracies such
as Mexico has been seeking to establish since 1911, the mid-
dle class has risen rapidly, and there need be no question as
to its future under broader education and the slow change
of the laws regulating the rights of property and in the new
opportunity for advancement in the coming industrial era.

There is still an instinctive leaning toward aristocracy and
oligarchies rise and fall, with each succeeding group of new
generals establishing themselves in the palaces, literal and
figurative, of the older aristocrats whom they have ousted.
This heritage goes back directly to the caste system, and it
is being changed only as the middle classes emerge and ob-
tain, through the years, some sense of their own importance
and of their capabilities in fields other than politics or war-
fare. It has long been a commonplace to blame much of
Latin America's difficulties on the absence of a middle class,
but it will be increasingly important, as time goes on, to
note that such a class is developing. It is coming both in
the emergence to greater social consciousness of the local
mestizo groups and also, increasingly, through the immigra-
tion of men and women of European blood.

The Coming of Populations 65

There has in recent years been an effort in many direc-
tions, but chiefly from Mexico, to glorify disproportionately
the Indian heritage of Latin America, to urge a return to the
primitive social organization and to the primitive arts of
the aborigines as a solution of the political and social ills of
these countries. This effort has largely failed in its practical
applications, as the Mexican leader, General Plutarco Elias
Calles, pointed out in 1930. Even more deeply than Gen-
eral Calles and the other leaders of the Mexican revolution
saw, however, Indianism as a social and political panacea
has proven inherently ineffective. Primitive cultures, when
time was allowed them to develop (as the primitive culture
of the ancient European savages had time to their advan-
tage), have evolved over long periods into the civilizations
of today. Where, on the other hand, time has not served
and the impact of more advanced cultures has come to offer
easier and more effective solutions of the common prob-
lems of the human struggle upward, the native genius,
handicapped by savagery and barbarism, has always been
stopped or nullified. Such a fate has fallen to the Indians
of Latin America. Spain, Portugal and France came to
them and gave them their culture, their religion and their
language. There was no choice, and today the idea of re-
viving Indianism is fantastic. With all the white man's
mistakes of misunderstanding, with all the problems of the
mixture of races and the conflict of property rights and so-
cial systems, the higher civilization has of necessity pre-
vailed. The efforts to reverse the currents of progress have
failed, as they must always fail.

Just as the foundations of society and government in
Saxon America trace back to English custom and English
law, despite the infiltration of hundreds of strains other
than English, so in Latin America the customs, laws and

66 Greater America

social structure, and all that those connote, are Spanish or
Portuguese or, even in black Haiti, French. The political
wisdom of the mother countries was perhaps inadequate
and the Creole and mixed-blood heirs of that rule may have
been less understanding, and still less liberal, but none the
less the noblest heritage of Latin America is Spanish,
Portuguese or French as the case may be. They would still
be groping in tribal wars, without a history and without a
future, had the dynamic and balancing force of those older
civilizations not come to them four centuries ago. The In-
dians of the colonies under the rule of Church and State
became a definite, even if a humble, part of the social
structure and there they have remained through the suc-
ceeding generations. No sentimental attraction for the
beauty of their communism or for the pitiful state of their
life under their white rulers can change their status. As the
records of the past show, albeit dimly, that status has im-
proved immeasurably with the passing of the years and
with the white man's advancing concepts of social order and
responsibility.

Even in the beginning of the colonial rule, it would prob-
ably have been impossible, even if it had been tried, to gov-
ern according to Indian tradition. The white man under-
stood but imperfectly the Indian systems even of land ten-
ure, and the early efforts to perpetuate the communal hold-
ings within the areas of the encomiendas (the source of the
claims in Mexico in recent years that these systems should
be revived) met with confusion and disaster. Moreover, it
is all too often true that the customs and traditions of less
advanced races are the very factors that hold them back,
and the break away from those ancient rules and baseless
traditions has been the most essential element of their own
emancipation.

The Coming of Populations 67

The early Spaniards, and even more their successors since
the revolutions, had a deep sense of responsibility toward
the Indians and, although perhaps with mistakes, they have
sought sincerely to find the way to lead them forward.
That the fruits of that effort have been slow is not a reason
for condemnation; thousands of years of Indian conserva-
tism and tradition chained them, and probably would chain
them still if it were not for the efforts of the white men to
revamp their lives. Injustices there have been and will con-
tinue to be, but the future of the Indian races of Latin
America is not badly off in the hands of their mixed blood
and white compatriots. Again, we shall fall into grievous
error if we accept the easy philosophy of those who see any
hope for Latin America in the creation of an artificial
Utopian communism based on the traditions and customs
which the Indians have themselves all but forgotten. The
mission of Spain and that of the modern republics is cer-
tainly not, in the light of the needs of the Indians or of the
modern world, to preserve, much less to revive from cen-
turies of coma, the institutions that make for social and eco-
nomic bondage and stagnation amongst the less advanced
members of the social structure.

In looking upon the life of the Indians in Mexico, Guate-
mala and Peru, and also to a lesser extent in other countries,
it has become fashionable for foreign writers to describe the
simple life of unspoiled communities in terms heretofore
employed chiefly in the descriptions of idyllic English,
French and other Old World villages. The misery of the
picturesque Indians of the Americas is given a fantastic
beauty that is quite at variance with the facts. However
honest these writers may be in their own appreciation, their
descriptions must inevitably create a totally erroneous im-

68 Greater America

pression in the thoughts of their readers who do not know
the lands they describe. One anecdote will perhaps suffice
to give the picture:

Years ago, in riding through the highland Andes of Co-
lombia, I came one night to a socalled inn in the paramo,
the windswept plain high above the timber line. I was
served with the best the house afforded, a greasy soup, a
"steak" of dried goat-meat, soggy potatoes, indescribable
coffee and a bit of hard turron candy for dessert. The
grimy, wondering little girl who waited on my solitary
table received the bit of candy with hungry appreciation
and in the course of the talk thus loosened she said, wist-
fully, that although one did not, ever in one's life, get to see
the great world, "one is content, up here."

That night, swinging in my own hammock, covered with
my own overcoat, the peon who served as guide, hostler and
servanjt received with equal , appreciation the use of the
blanket which had been offered me by the host. In the
morning the peon asked me, quite as a matter of fact, if I
had slept well, and whether the "little white things," which
had bothered him, had also disturbed my slumbers.

"One is content, up here," surely, but there certainly is
something far better than the misery of today to be looked
for, from the civilization of machines and work and pros-
perity, material though these things be. The opportunity
for culture comes with a full stomach and with cleanliness,
surely in Latin America just as in Saxon America. And the
gifts of those opportunities come, not from the Indian, but
from the European side of the racial heritage.

The growing stability and peace and the increasing pros-
perity of the countries of Latin America have, since the in-
dependence, brought new blood from every country of

The Coming of Populations 69

Europe and from. North America as well, although the flow
of immigration is not yet the flood that it will some day be-
come and which it must become to make possible that de-
velopment of Latin America toward which the future tends.

The number of Spaniards coming as immigrants to the
colonies in the last years before independence was greatly
restricted, and in the first years thereafter was definitely cut
off but it was resumed in later years and is steadily increas-
ing. In Brazil, the brief period when the Portuguese court
was moved from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro during the Na-
poleonic wars was not only effective in probably postponing
the independence of Brazil, but also brought an increased
influx of the best Portuguese blood, which did much to
stamp its national characteristics on the great colony.

Certain countries of Spanish America, like * Costa Rica,
with its almost pure Spanish blood, and the highland de-
partments of Colombia where the unchanged Spanish peas-
ant type persists and prospers, are still distinctly 1 of the Old
World. Throughout all the countries indeed there are to be
found centers of pure white blood, surviving through cen-
turies of isolation in the seas of Indianism. Certain sections
have been fully populated by colonies of Europeans in re-
cent years. Southern Chile, for instance, has thousands of
Germans who came in those migrations after 1848 which
populated so much of the northern Middle West of the
United States and who have retained in Chile both racial
purity and language. Western Argentina, for another ex-
ample, has cities made up almost entirely of Italians, and
the characteristic dress of the Piedmontese is found in whole
villages in the Argentine wine country. And yet they all
speak Spanish as their second, if not their first, language.

Indeed, the Argentines, save the old aristocracy and, para-
doxically, the gauchos of the plains, are today descended in

70 Greater America

probably as great proportion as the population of the United
States from European immigrants who have come since the
independence, or are themselves those immigrants. Nearly
one quarter of the entire population of Argentina today is
the first generation of immigrants. The figures for 1930
were 11,200,000 inhabitants, 8,250,000 being natives of
European descent exclusively, 300,000 mixed-bloods, and 2,-
650,000 aliens, Europeans in the majority. Many of the im-
portant Argentine families are of British origin, and the
Anglo-Argentines and Irish-Argentines are distinctive but
patriotically Argentine units of the population.

The mass of Argentine immigration has, however, been
Italian and Spanish, and there has been a continual infiltra-
tion of other varied strains from Europe. In 1924, Italian
and Spanish immigrants came in almost equal proportion,
and together represented 78 per cent of the entries into Ar-
gentina. Six years later, with no fall in immigration totals,
these elements had dropped to 52 per cent, and Poles, Ger-
mans, Jugoslavs and Czechoslovaks had risen in totals and
in percentage, and Poles had already become the third most
important element in the foreign population. A point that
is of primary importance is that these immigrants have come
in floods, not in a steady stream such as has flowed to the
United States and Canada and which, although varying
from period to period as to origin, has brought a steady in-
flux of new blood to be absorbed, through the years, into the
stream of life of the northern nations of the hemisphere.

Political conditions and economic developments which
have made favorable conditions for small farmers and in-
dustrial workers have been the dominating factors in Latin
American immigration in the past. The opening of the
Argentine pampas to farming and of the slopes of the
Andes to viniculture brought the first of the streams of im-

The Coming of Populations 71

migration there. The development of the coffee industry in
Brazil and the expansion of manufacturing in Brazilian
cities were similarly the motivating causes of Brazilian
immigration. Other floods will come, as opportunity and
government propaganda and aid to immigrants develop and
become more secure and as, indeed, thef closing doors of the
northern countries of the hemisphere turn Europe's surplus
millions to the new areas.

European immigration into Latin America since the rev-
olutions of the early Nineteenth Century has, however, been
increasing but slowly and excepting for Argentina and
Brazil is as yet of no great consequence. Brazil, during the
years preceding and then directly following the Great war,
had an immigration of about 200,000 Europeans a year, and
Argentina considerably more. The Argentine gain in im-
migration is, however, rather less in the net than the Bra-
zilian, because probably a majority of the arrivals in Ar-
gentina were workers who came from Spain and Italy only
for the harvests which are at opposite seasons to their own,
while Brazil does not attract so many of these seasonal
workers.

As to the future trends in immigration, either to Argen-
tina and Brazil or to other countries, it is, as with so many
of the factors bearing on the future development of Latin
America, impossible to judge the future by the past. Im-
migrants usually go to certain selected sections in any flow
of migration, and in the United States and Canada to this
day most newcomers go to the centers where their relatives
or people from their home villages have settled, even a gen-
eration ago, and they cannot be diverted by any ordinary
inducements.

There seems no reason to believe otherwise than that the

72 Greater A merica

next quarter-century will see great increases of immigration
in many other countries besides Argentina and Brazil.
Conceivably the next flow of immigration may be to Vene-
zuela, once the question of the future peace there is decided.
It may turn to Mexico, although the emphasis on Indianism
and on the idyllic beauty of Indian communism and the
simple life are not the stuff that tempts the hard-headed
European who is seeking to better his condition. Chile
offers much, and so indeed do Colombia and Peru. But
perhaps in considering the future of immigration to Latin
America we must get away from the old standards of im-
migration into the United States, where it was the farmer
who primarily came to open the new territories, and only
secondarily the industrial worker. In Latin America, con-
sidering all the social and economic limitations of the life of
the farm worker, it seems inevitable that some, at least, of
the desirable immigration of the immediate future will be
of industrial classes, mechanical workers and machine users,
even users of modern farm machinery, rather than tillers of
the soil in the old sense.

This is a sharp break from our conventional ideas, and in-
deed from the ideas of most of those in Latin America itself
who would encourage immigration into their various coun-
tries. The tradition is that any city dweller is an undesirable
immigrant, and that any farmer is desirable. Almost every
thought on the subject has also been concerned with dupli-
cating in Latin America the history of immigration into the
United States and Canada, which is in theory agricultural.
But Latin America has a plethora of agricultural workers,
and their life is hard and their returns from their labor low.
The future of Latin American immigration is tied in, cer-
tainly, with the industrial awakening which becomes more
and more, as we go deeper into the problems of today, the

The Coming of Populations 73

bright focal point of Latin American advance. As in the very
question of economic independence, the promise of the Euro-
pean immigration of the future seems to turn on the develop-
ment of the countries to a higher standard of living through
a saner and broader building of the social and industrial
structure. Perhaps the most significant phase of this analysis
of the future immigration situation in Latin America is that
the growing industries and improving opportunity for skilled
workers in factories and shops opens a definite field for
immigration from the United States and Canada. That flow
of immigration may well set in before the quarter-century
of our vision here is ended.

In looking at this question of possible future immigration
from the United States, it is exceedingly significant to real-
ize that in Mexico, prior to the fall of Porfirio Diaz in 1911,
there had been a continuing immigration of young men,
some with wives and families, into Mexico from the United
States and Canada. Part of these were railway men and
industrial mechanics, but part were business men and office
workers of various sorts and some were skilled farmers
founding modern orchards and vegetable farms. Most of
them had gone to Mexico expecting to spend their lives
there, and careful and permanent provision was being made
for the schooling of their children in their new homes. The
exile, voluntary and otherwise, of these Anglo-Saxon Mexi-
cans after the fall of Diaz has in the past twenty years had
a far greater influence than most people realize on the atti-
tude of the young men of the United States and Canada
toward going into Latin America to live and die there.

The passing years are now softening the memory of the
wreck of those hopes in Mexico and the growing opportu-
nity, and the need in Latin American development, for this
type of immigrant will conceivably bring a new outpouring.

74 Greater America

England has sent such colonies abroad, and particularly into
Chile and Argentina, and changing conditions in industry,
agriculture and business in the United States and Canada,
with broadening opportunity in Latin America, may well
have similar results in other directions. It goes without
saying that these types of immigrants entering into the life
o the countries to which they go, and planning to remain
and give their lives to the land of their adoption, means
much both to the trade and cultural relations of the United
States and Canada and to the lands which need the skill and
energies of this new type of continental American.

Efforts to stimulate the bringing of organized "colonies"
of immigrants have been made at some time or another by
all the countries of Latin America. As a result farming
groups from the United States, Canada and Europe have
found their way to the new fields, usually to meet with dis-
aster through political or economic drawbacks. Even the
hardy Mennonites have had difficult times in Paraguay
where they went shortly after the World War to escape mili-
tary service. The Mormons in northern Mexico, who had
built a garden not unlike their old Utah homes in Durango,
were driven out during the revolutions of 1911-1921. Ar-
gentina in the past has sought to control the flow of immi-
grants to those who could support themselves on the land,
and from the immense immigrant hotel in Buenos Aires, to
direct them (with a skill unknown in any other country)
to the interior and so prevent their filling the slums of the
cities. This control will develop naturally into a careful
propaganda and the bringing of fitted immigrants to the
Argentine farms. But there, again, lies the need of new
property laws and the cutting up of vast estates. Slow so-
cial change determines the flow of populations. Suffice, per-

The Coming of Populations 75

haps, that various of the nations of Latin America offer to-
day, and more will offer as years go on, new opportunities
fit to tempt the hardy European and North American
farmer and the artisan and business man as well to
those new fields. In all this lies much of the hope for the
great days of the future in Latin America,

The question of Asiatic immigration remains. Most of
the countries now have laws restricting the entry of Hindu,
Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Others, like Brazil,
rather encourage them. There is a wide-spread belief that
the Asiatic, with his "lower standards of living" should be
excluded, but the fact remains that in times of progress
and the future is going to demand greater progress than in
all the centuries of the past there is a problem in the
scarcity of common labor in the tropical and sub-tropical
countries of Latin America that cannot be answered by
European immigration nor perhaps by any normal increase
in the native mixed and Indian populations. The European
traditionally cannot engage in hard manual labor under the
tropical sun; in any case he does not emigrate in order to do
it. Latin American standards of living are, moreover, too
low as yet to tempt him in the laboring classes, either from
his original home or from the United States which, as sug-
gested above, will ultimately become a center of emigra-
tion.

There are now substantial populations of Chinese and
Japanese in Peru and Brazil and small numbers in other
countries. They are not only laborers but small storekeep-
ers and artisans. They have been accused of driving the
native Peruvians, for instance, out of many trades, like bar-
bering and carpentry, and out of the little stores which,
however, were actually operated by Spanish immigrants

76 Greater America

more often than by natives of any of the lands. Whether
the immigration of Orientals can or should be restricted in
Latin America is a question which cannot be decided out of
hand. The natural prejudgment of the North American is
that they should, and yet the issue is not so easily settled in
lands with limited populations and serious lack of hands
and workers. It leaves the need for merchanization greater
than ever, in any case.

The larger issue remains, and that is that Latin America
must, as surely as must Australia, be held for the white race,
for the sake of the future of that race. There is no gain-
saying the fact that Japan casts envious eyes on Latin Amer-
ica, and on South America in particular, as an outlet for its
surplus population and as a future sphere of influence
through its emigrants. How long can Latin America wait
for the coming of the new populations which we would
send her from Europe and from the North ? How rapidly
must our machines, indeed, be hurried to an outstanding
place in Latin America's economic life to take the place of
inadequate labor supplies ?

The possibilities in Latin America of population growth
from within are only beginning to be realized and must soon
be given increasing consideration. Before the colonial period
ended, the increase of the white population from births,
small as it was, was greater than by immigration, and this
has been changed only in those areas which have been espe-
cially favored by immigration, like Argentina and Brazil.
The modern problem of population increase from within
is concerned primarily with the reduction of the high death
rate and particularly of the appalling infantile mortality of
ages past, including not alone the Indian era but down to
the present day. The remedy includes education, sanitation

The Coming of Populations 77

and the elimination of the diseases which have scourged
various sections of Latin America for centuries. In this work
great strides have been made, first, and so far most effec-
tively, from without through the ministrations of the Rocke-
feller International Health Board, always in co-operation
with the local authorities.

The foci of yellow fever in Ecuador, Brazil and Mexico
have been cleaned up so effectively that that dread disease no
longer ever appears on endemic and seldom in epidemic
form; Cuba, with the aid of the United States government
forces, long ago achieved the same end. The battle now is
against malaria, tuberculosis, pellagra, hookworm and
against other intestinal parasites. Health stations and educa-
tion have been and are accomplishing wonders. The same
is true in water purification and sanitation; pure water sup-
plies and sewage systems are covering the continent, and the
chlorination of drinking water is now a fixed policy in every
municipality where the wonders of modern science have
penetrated. These means cannot but tend toward the im-
provement of the native strain, the reduction of the heavy
infant mortality, the elimination of the deadly curse of lazi-
ness due to hookworm and pellagra, and in making possible
the taking of full advantage of the great gifts of modern
science and engineering.

This brief picture of the population problems in Latin
America of necessity must take into consideration the chang-
ing distribution of the populations, in part because of the
influence of immigrants and in part because of changing
ideals of life imported from abroad or drilled into the minds
of the people by the slow processes of educational uplift.

As Latin American countries move into more stable polit-
ical life and into greater safety and security, private resources

78 Greater America

are built up, more work (outside the raising of the bare
necessities of life from the ground) is created and the factors
which influence the shifting of populations within the coun-
tries become more powerful. In the past, the movement of
people from city to country and from country to city was
largely determined by the revolutions that swept over these
lands from time to time, making the country unsafe, the
products of the farms subject to raids and ruin, and the cities
above all else places of refuge. The movement into the cities
has always been remarked in times of revolution and
banditry, and when peace and order came the movement
was in turn out from the cities to the country, an inexorable
pendulum.

Even in recent years, we have been able to see this very
thing happening in Mexico, where during the ten years of
revolution following 1911, the City of Mexico enjoyed a
phenomenal growth, expanding from 400,000 to nearly
1,000,000 inhabitants in a few years. The housing problem
became acute and a great boom in building followed. Since
peace has settled down on Mexico the people are moving
back to the farms and villages. The capital has lost less
than other cities, and indeed has recovered its 1,000,000 in-
habitants by annexing various of its suburbs. An interest-
ing corollary to this ebb and flow in Mexico itself was the
outflow of Mexican emigrants to the United States during
the revolutions. This ran, according to official estimates, up
to 200,000 a year and in 1930 and 1931, in times of decreas-
ing employment in the United States and also of peace in
Mexico, it set in the opposite direction, from the United
States back to Mexico.

But it is impossible accurately to judge the future, with
the peace that the necessities of the times and the needs of
the countries must enforce, by the past periods of revolutions
and uncertainty. The city in Latin America is ceasing to

The Coming of Populations 79

be only a center of refuge. As in the case of the City of
Mexico, just cited, the city becomes now a center of expan-
sion and a center of national industry. It thus, in its turn,
becomes actually a creator of the new trend in the life of
Latin America which, as suggested above, will influence the
types of immigration of the future. The cities are now be-
coming centers of attraction in time of peace as well as of
war, a phenomenon common in the industrial growth in
the United States and Canada (the movement away from
the farms and into industry) but renewed and peculiarly
significant in Latin America. With increasing momentum
we shall probably see this tendency manifesting itself more
and more in these countries, with a connoted significance as
regards the development of industrial, as well as urban life
as such, which is not to be ignored.

Still other factors than those of race characteristics have
impressed themselves in the formation of the peoples of
Latin America today, and will have still greater significance
in the future. Of these the influence of the United States
has of course been outstanding. The chapters! which follow
will emphasize this influence in many directions, tending
always as it does to the creation of the elements of a Greater
America of closer thought and planning together. One
phase, however, belongs especially in this discussion of the
populations.

In the past quarter-century the United States, with its
successful raising of the worker to a plane of comfort and
prosperity once almost beyond the ken of the Latin Amer-
ican farm worker or artisan, has carried to Latin America
the idea of the development of the individual to a high stand-
ard of living and a high productive and purchasing power.
The long years of exploitation have ended in the presenta-
tion of the ideal of self -expansion, the making of a people

8o Greater A merica

into a great market by the simple process of helping them
to earn the money with which to buy. It is as advantageous
to Latin Americans as to those who would sell to them.

There has also been, undoubtedly, a deep change in the at-
titude of the upper classes of Latin America toward work,
long described as the chief "racial" failing in industrial ex-
pansion. This has been marked especially in the fields of
engineering and commercial enterprises. Its influence has,
moreover, extended to the very core of the life of the coun-
tries, the symbol of this being the attitude of the women of
good family toward the seeking of employment in the fields
of teaching and, recently, of business. Only a few years ago
no Latin American woman of good breeding, even if she
were in poverty or an unwelcome dependent in the house-
hold of a brother or a married sister, would have thought of
demeaning herself with teaching, let alone with taking em-
ployment in a business office; indeed, no respectable Latin
American young woman of any class would work in an
office. Yet today that great release of the single woman is
almost as common in Latin America as it is in the United
States. Perhaps the North American motion picture has
expiated its many sins by its part in that one achievement!

Whatever be the immediate cause, however, that freeing
of the Latin American woman is symbolic, and almost epic
in its importance. With her has come the day of work for
her brother, the engineer, who before the last historic decade
wasted his engineering education and skill in the solving of
abstruse problems with pencil and paper on cafe tables;
today he solves them in the mud and grime of the "job,"
and glories in it. Their energy, their efficiency, and their
devotion to the ideals, if you will, of a "materialistic civiliza-
tion" are the promise of the development, out of the factors
existent in Latin America today, of a new era of firm ad-
vance in every phase of life, cultural as well as commercial,

The Coming of Populations 81

in the critical quarter-century which lies before us. It is the
answer of the populations of Latin America to the first ques-
tion that we must all ask as to that future.

So we come to what is perhaps the most significant state-
ment that will enter into this book. And that is this: Latin
America, as it has developed and is now developing, is to-
day actually closer in its ideals and in its tendencies to the
United States than it is to old Spain or to any of the various
elements, from the Indian down to the most recent Euro-
pean or Asiatic, that has entered into its make-up. The
Latin American is thoroughly and definitely American in
the sense that he is a part of what seems certainly to be a new
type, that type which Europeans feel they can recognize
without labels, and afar off. Canada and the United States
are of that new type in the world; no Canadian who has
faced the stares of his English cousins will disagree there.
But so, also, are the Latin Americans, closer to us of the
North than they are to Europe, more a part of our civiliza-
tion today than they are of the civilization of Europe.

This feeling, which has been growing, I now realize, for
years in my mind, came to me most clearly of all in Caracas,
Venezuela in Venezuela, which is Latin America of the
Latin Americans, intensively and intensely. That was many
years ago. The conviction has grown with the passage of
time. It is, perhaps, more than all else the key to the under-
standing of Latin America, that they are like us, and of our
world and that if they differ in details, as of language and
laws and legal phrases, or of customs that perhaps go back
to the Moors, they are yet, in the vital things of their life
and ours today, a part of the America that stands four-
square as the bulwark of a practical, a productive future to
which we, and they, belong together.

Chapter V
THE GROWTH OF COMMUNICATIONS

THE record of the trail blazer, of the builder of bridges,
whether of ships or steel or friendship, is romantic beyond
all tales of conquest. It is the swelling theme of the vital
human drama that unrolls through the ages upon the uneven
stage of economic and social change. The development of
communications is indeed the backbone of the whole struc-
ture of the past, and of the future.

The record in Latin America takes two main branches,
the communications across the seas to Latin America and
the communications within that area a divergence once
tremendous but united and compromised, now and for the
future, in ships of the air that cross oceans and jungles with
equal ease and safety.

Columbus sailed to the discovery of America in a ship of
about 100 tons, smaller than a tugboat, and his other two
ships were without decks, and little bigger than small pleas-
ure schooners of today. The usual size of the storied Spanish
galleons most of them lumbering slow scows in actuality
was from 500 to 1500 tons, the largest hardly the size of the
smallest tramp steamer that would dare the seas today. A
convoy of ten to twenty-five galleons carried, then, in com-
bined tonnage little more than the cargo of a single modern
freight liner. Spanish ships of war and those of the English
buccaneers were alike playthings of wind and wave; the
largest of the Spanish battleships that went down in the
Armada, conquered not by the Elizabethan mariners but
by the storms of the English channel, was but 1800 tons.

The earliest ships to visit the Americas followed, of neces-

82

The Growth of Communications 83

sity, the trade winds, so they skirted westward near the
equator where the trade winds blow steadily from Europe
to the Americas. On the return trips they sought a more
northerly course, further up toward the eastbound gales of
the "great circle" over which airplanes now fly from Amer-
ica to Europe. The westward air traffic from Europe to the
Americas seeks again, today, the southern route and the
westward trade winds, as did the mariners of four centuries
ago. Indeed, the story of the pioneering of the sailing ships
of the Sixteenth Century has been paralleled in our own day
by the pioneering of the aviators, flying the same routes,
seeking the same goals, north and south, in these Americas
of ours.

So important were the trade winds in the communications
between the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and Europe
that the center of virtually all the traffic of the whole colo-
nial era was in the Caribbean Sea where the fleets sailing
westward came directly to Panama, blown by the trade
winds, and on the return voyage circled the mainland north
to Mexico and thence eastward through the straits of Florida
and, as best they might, caught the eastbound winds of the
North Atlantic.

The convoy was the normal and indeed the only relatively
safe means of transporting goods and soldiers westward and
treasure eastward. The galleons (or merchant ships) were
slow and clumsy and easy prey to the lively British, French
and Dutch pirates, but the convoys, protected by a fleet of
Spanish warships, were fairly secure from attack, although
they moved, as did the convoys of troop-ships and freighters
across the Atlantic in 1917 and 1918, at the speed of the
slowest, ship. Seldom, except when storms broke up the
convoys, did the pirates dare attack, and then only the single
ships that drifted away.

84 Greater America

The convoys, which left only at long intervals, once or
twice a year, to and from Panama and Mexico, and traveled
westward at corresponding intervals, were the only legal
communications between the colonies and Europe. Trade
with any nation but Spain or Portugal was forbidden by
royal edict, and death was the penalty for any non-Spanish
trader found in the colonies. The only exception to this
rule was, as noted above, that the annual fairs held at central
points, most notably at Puerto Bello in Panama, could be
attended under license by foreign merchants. It was these
traders who, in times between the fairs and with the wel-
coming connivance of the harassed Spanish colonials, built
up the extensive enterprises of smuggling that laid the basis
of the first non-Spanish trade in Latin America. The line,
too, was dim and uncertain between smuggler, privateer and
pirate, and the walled cities still standing in Latin America
(Cartagena in Colombia and Campeche in Mexico are the
finest examples extant, although portions of old walls re-
main in Havana and elsewhere) are grim reminders of the
peril for the Spanish pioneers from English, French, Dutch
and Hanseatic traders of colonial days. One of the reasons
for building capitals like Caracas, Bogota, and the cities of
Central America at distances or on heights away from the
Caribbean coast was certainly the fear of the incursions of
the non-Spanish traders who came one day to sell their
smuggled goods and the next to take back both the goods
and also the wealth and the women of their erstwhile
customers.

Those British trading ships came, as the centuries fol-
lowed one another and easy gold became less and less abun-
dant in the Iberian colonies, to be almost the only contact
between the colonies and Europe, and slowly the restrictions

Communications Shipping 85

against them were made ineffective. The Spanish convoys
had become less frequent, or smaller in the number of ships,
and in the last century of Spanish rule England had already
become the outstanding maritime power in the New World.
The British flag came, then, to be better known in the ports
of Latin America than that of Spain or of Portugal and
British trade, slowly encroached upon by the German, be-
came the symbol of all overseas commerce and business
relations. In far away Chile, as elsewhere, the British "boat
day" became the most important date in the monthly calen-
dar, a custom which has persisted as settlement date down
to the present. It has caused not a little unfriendly comment
from Latin American merchants, when local branches of
North American banks sought to institute the custom of
collecting bills on the date due although, as the indignant
local merchants pointed out eloquently, this was a form of
highway robbery if there was not going to be a boat to
carry the mail for another week!

As the years passed, North American ships appeared on
the scene, first the early home-built ships of the British
colonials, and after 1789 the swift Yankee clippers, skirting
the Horn en route to the Orient, and Yankee whaling ships
scouring the South Atlantic and up into the Pacific north-
ward to the Galapagos islands on the Equator and beyond
to the Arctic seas. They stopped at many South American
colonial ports (the rough sailors laying the foundations of
the reputation for Yankee bad manners which we are still
seeking to live down, after a! century and a half) and before
long those ports themselves were becoming regular stops
in trading expeditions. Finally, a few of the old North
American merchant houses began sending their own ships,
flying their own flags, to buy and sell in South America as
they had been doing for half a century in the Caribbean

86 Greater A merica

islands. Those merchant flags became a basic part of the
life of South America and particularly of the West Coast,
although but one of them, that of the House of Grace, has
persisted to this day. In the North, Mexico and the Carib-
bean had long been a part of the commercial life of New
England, the former for the commerce with rich colonials
through the port of Vera Cruz and from the Orient via the
"Manila Galleon" and transshipment across Mexico, the lat-
ter as sources of the sugar and molasses which, distilled into
rum in New England ports, became one of the chief coins
of trade in those early days.

Ship and steamship communications between the Ameri-
can countries have ebbed and flowed and for a time, when
United States shipping had dropped to its lowest in the late
Nineteenth Century, the ships of the great merchant houses
were alone carrying the United States flag to the ports of
Latin America. But British lines put in tiny ships on these
routes and North American owners, with foreign-built ships
flying the flags of Cuba, Mexico, Panama and the countries
of Central America, kept up the trade. Miserable though
those services were, and favoring the always better Euro-
pean services as they did, yet they were still the bases of a
growing trade relationship. The years that have followed,
particularly since the World War, have seen the establish-
ment of new lines, including the important Munson Line
on the East Coast of South America to correlate the Grace
on the West Coast (for the Grace liners began using the
Panama Canal instead of skirting the Horn as soon as it was
opened for traffic). The Ward Line, to Cuba and Mexico,
maintained through a long service with ships mostly flying
the Cuban flag, became in 1917 completely North Amer-
ican in tonnage as well as management. Fleets of the United

Communications Ewers 87

Fruit Company, built on the banana trade, entered the
picture, giving increasingly good service to Central America
and the Caribbean. The Panama Canal tempted yet others
to touch at the ports of Latin America en route east or west
to more distant lands. From New Orleans and from the
Pacific Coast lines of ships set out and some prospered and
have survived, to continue to expand the trade of the Amer-
icas. Meanwhile the old Lamport and Holt Line, which
under the British flag had been for years the only link be-
tween the East Coast of South America and New York,
had withdrawn and the British owned Furness-Prince Line
was offering competition, and correlated bi-weekly service,
to the Munson Line.

At the same time, the lines plying between South Amer-
ica and Europe have in general been somewhat in advance,
in service and speed, of those linking North and South
America, although for a time, following the war, the Mun-
son Line ships held the palm. Passenger liners comparable
in many ways to the finer ships of the North Atlantic trade
of their era have competed sharply with one another in the
European-South American trade and it has often been pos-
sible, by taking the faster ships of the North Atlantic serv-
ice, for a traveler from New York going to Rio de Janeiro
or Buenos Aires, to make almost equal time and at little
more cost, going by way of Europe than direct from New
York southward. The ships on the north-south lanes were
combination freight and passenger ships (as contrasted with
European passenger liners) and have built, with their im-
provements year after year, chiefly on commercial rather
than on passenger traffic. The companies have felt that
passenger travel north-and-south was not subject to a rapid
development by advanced service.

It is true that in almost all cases the quality of all the

88 Greater America

services has been a few steps ahead of what the traffic and
the income of the lines justified, although little has been
done to encourage tourist travel with tempting accommoda-
tions and rates competitive, even on a day or mileage basis,
with similar ships in the North Atlantic trade. The Grace
Line has developed its service slowly and well, each fleet
being an advance over its predecessors. The Ward Line has
done the same, and gradually the growing trade has met
its response. The Munson Line to South America has large
and fast ships in project. Beyond the needs of traffic and
the tonnage rates which make new and faster ships profit-
able looms always, however, the opportunity for leading
new travel and new trade into the north-south lines by
leaping far beyond needs or deserts to create new traffic, to
build new "bridges" of opportunity of communication be-
tween the continents. For all transportation, if it performs
its function, must outstrip current traffic needs.

Under the colonial regime, the great rivers which in many
sections of Latin America offered open avenues of travel
were very generally left to the old transportation methods
of the Indians, dugout canoes or, in the upper reaches of the
Amazon and other of the great rivers of South America, to
two-story rafts shooting the terrifying rapids of the Andes,
or on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia to the balsas or floating cradles
of thatch all still acceptable means of travel and transport
in these regions of South America.

The whole of Latin America, however, shares with North
America the prodigality of attitude toward the opportunities
of river travel. Since the age of steam there has been some
advantage taken of the rivers but as a whole the era of the
full use of the streams is yet to come. There are many ex-
planations for this, and some notable exceptions.

Communications Rivers 89

The islands of the Caribbean are of course not blessed with
navigable rivers. Mexico in its northern section has virtually
none but even those that exist are not plied by steamers and
but little by power boats, in which a world of opportunity
for development seems to lie. In southern Mexico there
exist two river systems, that of the Coatzacoalcos on the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec and that of the Grijalva and
Usumacinta, in Tabasco, a system of immense extent and
covering a vast territory with mighty streams rising in the
high cordilleras. Both flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
Neither of them is adequately developed, although the
southern system, opening into the sea at Frontera, is the
only means of communication throughout the whole of the
rich state of Tabasco and is plied by many river steamers
of ancient vintage and accommodations best left to the
imagination, with perfect assurance that they will not be
libelled.

In Central America the rivers are generally completely
neglected, although on the Caribbean seaboard they pene-
trate into fine tropical farming and grazing territory and
on the Pacific at least one river, the Lempa in El Salvador,
meanders through some of the finest sections of that rich
republic.

In Nicaragua and coasting Costa Rica is the San Juan
River, living, flowing proof that river transportation has
been possible and will yet be profitable again. This river,
which is part of the route of the proposed Nicaraguan canal,
flows eastward into the Caribbean from Lake Nicaragua and
up its length sailed, on various occasions, certain of the
doughty pirates of the colonial era to sack the city of
Granada, built far away on the Pacific shore in the hope of
avoiding just that experience. Generations later the San
Juan River, with a short coach-ride around the rapids, was

90 Greater America

a portion of the de luxe route from New York and New
Orleans to the California goldfields, under the direction of
Cornelius Vanderbilt His river steamers, like his fast ships
on the Atlantic and Pacific, gave pleasant (for those days)
means of travel, accommodations unknown there since the
fifties of the last century.

Traveling southward, the bays and lagoons of the Carib-
bean and of the Pacific shore give, crudely as yet, access for
tiny power boats as well as ocean steamships to regions as
yet only beginning to be unfolded to development. In
Panama, a network of rivers once cut the lowlands and into
the hills; when Sir Henry Morgan crossed the Isthmus of
Panama to sack the rich city of Panama in the buccaneering
days, he traveled in part by the Chagres River, now one of
the important sources of the water supply which operates
the locks of the Panama Canal. But it was hard going, for
the records of that expedition show that the rivers did not
furnish very direct routes of transport and before the jour-
ney was over, a stout leather boot was a dainty tidbit for
dinner.

Colombia is really the first of the countries, as we move
southward, which has made even a start toward adequate
use of her waterways. And there be those who declare that
Colombia has enslaved herself to the caprice of one tropical
river. The Magdalena, flowing northward from the high-
lands, has been the main route of travel between Bogota,
the highland capital, and the Caribbean Sea. The Cauca
River, paralleling it on the Pacific side of the Andes, is
less used today, for it is now paralleled itself, as is the cus-
tom of railway and highway builders the world around,
by the Pacific Railway and still more recently by a motor
road. The Magdalena, however, remains still the artery of

Communications Rivers 91

the life of Colombia, and indeed the air transport lines are
operated with hydroplanes which fly above that famous
stream for all the length of their bit of the trip from the
coast to the capital. Both boats and airplanes depend on the
railway, however, to carry their passengers and freight from
the river port of Girardot to Bogota. The Magdalena is
treacherous and highly temperamental and in the dry season
all of the many steamers plying its length may easily be
found,, not in the ports but high and dry on its banks, here
and there for its full length. Rapids at La Dorada, below
Girardot, require a portage by rail of both freight and pas-
sengers and the costs of transport mount, with good luck,
to only 100 per cent of the value of the cargo. River trans-
port has its difficulties and tropical heat on passengers and
cargo (especially if it be valuable coffee bags carried as deck
load) is neither pleasant nor improving. In large part,
however, the difficulties are due to the service which is
rendered rather than to any inherent fault with the idea of
river transport. With swift motor boats, modern barges
for freight and locks at the rapids, the comfort and cost of
living in Colombia would be materially benefited; there is
yet a world of advantage to be taken of the rich gifts that
Nature has showered on these lands.

In Venezuela the Orinoco, although barred at its delta by
shifting, shallow sands, is the main route of travel, needless
to say, in the far eastern section of the country. But there
too it is only half used, by characteristic old sailing ships
under the tropic sun or under tropic rains that turn not
only the river but vast areas of the flat llanos (which are
virtually only an immense river bottom of the Orinoco
system) into "navigable streams." Lake Maracaibo, in the
west of Venezuela near Colombia, has proven itself an
effective means of intercommunication not only between the

92 Greater America

ancient cities on its border but in recent years between the
oil fields and their centers of administration at Maracaibo,
and with each other. Here indeed modern motor boats are
in use and specially designed tankers, which can cross the
shallow bar of the straits that connect the lake with the
sea, transport the wealth of Venezuelan oil from the fields
to the refineries in the free ports of the Dutch islands off
the coast.

Into Lake Maracaibo pour many rivers, up one of which
a steamer finds its way to a connection with the railway
which leads into the interior of Andean Venezuela and by
railway and highway to the heart of the eastern section of
Colombia. The service is miserable beyond description, but
the highway of water is there and offers transport perhaps
commensurate with the needs of the regions, for railways or
roads could as yet not serve them economically.

In the slopes of the Andes southward and eastward from
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia lies the
immense basin of the Amazon and the related regions of
the upper Orinoco and its great tributary, the Rio Apure.
The Orinoco and the Amazon systems approach one another
in the flat jungle lowlands and a canal which flows slug-
gishly, sometimes toward the Amazon and sometimes to-
ward the Orinoco, has been declared by many explorers to
unite the two. The opening of the Rio Apure will some
day furnish the means for the development of a magnificent
interior portion of both Colombia and Venezuela. Modern
ships and modern power fuels have brought that time per-
ceptibly nearer; these regions, even the national boundaries
of which were never surveyed until the airplane came to
the rescue of baffled engineers, have possibilities that were
not even dreamed by the intrepid Spanish prospectors who
covered other regions so effectively.

Communications Elvers 93

The Amazon is navigated for two thousand miles by
ocean-going ships, but beyond Manaos and Iquitos (which
is in Peru), the terminal ports and once the great shipping
centers for the rubber of the Amazon valley, there is com-
paratively little use of the great river systems. Immense
difficulties of rapids and the sparsity of population affect
all this, of course, but undoubtedly the development of the
Amazon basin, when and as it comes, will use the mighty
highways of water for many long years and perhaps for
centuries. Certainly, cut as the Amazon region is by streams
of great or little depth and width, the building of highways
and through railways will be, if ever, a distant achieve-
ment. One tiny stretch of railway, around the rapids of
the Madeira River and across to the Mamore River, was built
in the middle of the last century chiefly to provide safer and
cheaper transport for rubber. The development of this
whole vast region, beyond this limited service (as good
probably as the present value of the trade deserves) is now
furnished by the ocean liners which ascend the Amazon
for 2,500 miles and by the lumbering river boats. A new
crop will have to come, a crop that may well be lumber or
pulpwood or paper pulp manufactured in those distant
plains for the needs of the world as a first step, and follow-
ing that other communications may come. The Amazon
basin offers an utterly magnificent vision of future develop-
ment of water transport, and of airplane service, of course,
above its placid streams.

The rivers of the Pacific side of the Andes of South
America are short, steep and swift. In Ecuador, only the
rivers that flow into the Gulf of Guayaquil penetrate rather
further into the lower valleys and are used extensively as
means of transport for the cacao plantations. Here, although
much is left to be desired in the ships and barges and their

94 Greater America

comforts and schedules of travel, the streams are serving
their purpose and serving it well. The Guayas River, on
which the port of Guayaquil is situated, furnishes the harbor
both for river boats and for the ocean liners and freighters
that touch the port.

All the way southward from Ecuador, the Andes are
close to the coast and although there are many inlets no
single stream of any size, or any great possibilities of naviga-
tion certainly, finds its way into the Pacific. Until the
southern fiords of Chile are reached, ocean-going coasting
steamers and highways and railways alone furnish routes
of transport they and the airships that have annihilated
time and therefore distance on these leisurely coasts.

The mighty river system of the Amazon rather over-
whelms, in our common thought, the splendor of the corre-
lated but separate system that lies to the south of it, that of
the Paraguay, Parana and Uruguay Rivers, all of which pour
into the mighty estuary of the Rio de la Plata. These three
rivers, with the tributaries which extend them to the foot-
hills of the Andes on the West and into the plains of the
Amazon on the North, are well served by steamship service,
and indeed nothing in all Latin America can be compared
to the service of freight and passengers which they provide.
Argentina's railway systems tap many of the territories
served by the river steamers but a great quantity of freight
travels by water. Thus, although the railway reaches to
Asuncion, Paraguay, that distant capital is also an important
river port to which small ocean-going liners can reach, as
well as the river boats. The Uruguay River skirts the coun-
try of that name, and is an important means of communica-
tion between its interior cities and the great world port
of Montevideo.

Steamers, with portages around rapids and, amongst

Communications Ports 95

other obstacles, the mighty falls of Iguazzu (comparable in
magnificence to Niagara and to Victoria Nyanza in Africa)
serve far distant regions in the interior of Brazil as well as
Argentina. They provide figurative highways already beaten
by the (sometimes primitive) traffic of four centuries for the
future development of the temperate and sub-tropical
regions of southern South America. No study of the possi-
bilities of the development of this most promising of all
the regions of Latin America can afford to overlook, in any
phase of its consideration, the great value and importance
of these water systems and of the development already at-
tained in communications by that means. In southern
Argentina there are a few streams emptying into the ocean
through Patagonia, and along the Atlantic seaboard small,
hardly navigable, streams drain the southern pampas.

Latin America has spent (not counting the port works of
Panama, which are part of the Panama canal), probably
more than $500,000,000, on the development of harbors
alone. These have ranged all the way from the simple con-
struction of landing platforms on the edges of steep coral
walls built by nature along the borders of completely per-
fect harbors like that of Willemstad on Curasao up to the
tremendous port works of Buenos Aires which have cost
close to $50,000,000 and are still in the building, or to the
frightfully difficult works on the Pacific coast of South
America where, as at Antofagasta, a single storm can lay
waste the engineering achievements of years and of millions
of dollars.

There have been immense losses in the sums that have
gone into the tremendous struggles to create port facilities,
losses both from graft and from inadequate engineering and
finance. The long history of port developments has, more-

P 6 Greater A merica

over, brought to light most of the evils that beset all Latin
American development in the early stages. Many of the
ports were, for instance, developed under the concession sys-
tem, a port works company formed in England or France
obtaining the right to levy, for a period of say fifty years, a
special port tax on every passenger and every package of
merchandise entering the harbor. In return for this they
were to build docks and other port facilities adequate to the
needs of the traffic. Scores of such port concessions were
issued and, in many cases, docks and port works were built
on a flimsy and inadequate scale, inadequate alike at the
time of their building and for the future. Many of these
concessions are still in force, and to this day in such im-
portant ports as La Guayra, the gateway to the capital of
Venezuela, the port charge is collected for the use of the
ancient, rotting pier, hardly up to modern traffic needs and
quite unprotected from storms that come from any direc-
tion except that of the prevailing winds. These ruinous
concessions have in many cases; forced the building of new
ports at other locations, because of the unwillingness and
indeed the financial inability of the owners of the expiring
concessions to make improvements.

The great port of Callao, Peru, one of the few fine harbors
of the Pacific coast of South America, until 1930 suffered
from an ancient port concession which had, half a century
before, provided a few shallow docks for the tiny sailing
ships of that day and which since that time had done noth-
ing to keep the port up to modern times. Every steamer of
any size and particularly the larger liners and passenger ships
had to anchor far out from shore and transport their passen-
gers and freight by lighter, while dingy sailing ships and
fishing boats alone docked at the ancient piers. In 1928 work
was begun to be finished three years later on a modern set

Communications Ports 97

of piers, capable of expansion as need shall come, built by a
large United States contracting firm for and on the account
of the Peruvian government.

There is no need nor room here to detail the story of the
building of the ports of Latin America. It embraces the ro-
mance of national struggles to link their lands, through the
ships of the sea, with the distant world. It involves the
story of great contractors and the romance of all the engi-
neers who fought back the jungle through the years of Latin
America's growth to maturity. It embraces tales, not so
thrilling, of knavery and corruption and theft from the
peoples of the countries and their governments and from the
investors abroad who bought the bonds.

Today beautiful and effective port facilities exist or are
building throughout Latin America. There are some al-
most perfect ports there. Willemstad is one, with its old
pirate history, but even there millions have been spent by a
great oil company to provide its own port within the older
harbor. There is Rio de Janeiro, the most beautiful and one
of the finest harbors in the world; despite its natural facili-
ticsi some $40,000,000 have been spent in razing hills about
the harbor and creating new waterfront facilities. There is
Antofagasta in Chile, where the engineers "took a chance"
to save money and built the sea wall on too narrow a foun-
dation so that a single storm, as noted above, wrecked the
work of years and of millions of dollars. There is Callao,
with its story of former inadequacy and, there and along the
whole West Coast, the difficulties and costs of handling
freight under the ancient and expensive domination of the
local longshoremen's unions. Panama is a modern harbor
with modern machinery for handling cargo, and the Cen-
tral American banana ports display a similar efficiency, on a
miniature scale, to the big harbors of the canal. There are

98 Greater America

used mechanical loading devices which the labor unions of
the ports of the United States and Europe will not allow the
banana importers to use in unloading the same fruit.

Thus* by slow and too often painful processes, Latin
America has forged its links with the sea lanes, and wherever
men have been able to bring their goods to the sea and to
load them on ships, then and there they have achieved con-
tact with the great pool of commerce.

Virtually all the railway building of Latin America
was a portion, or a reflection, of the great railway build-
ing era of the last half of the Nineteenth Century in the
United States and Canada. From 1850 onward until 1919,
when the drive for highways began, the building of rail-
ways with loans floated in Europe was the one expression
of the ideal of progress in all the Latin American countries.
It seemed so sure that the railways once built, the era of
wealth and prosperity would immediately be realized. In
those days Latin American governments were happy to
pledge their revenues for a century to come to obtain rail-
ways, and much of the vast volume of worthless public debts
which were floated in London through the last half of the
last century were directly or indirectly for railway construc-
tion. The government of Honduras, in 1871 and 1872,
keenly anxious to build an inter-oceanic railway, pledged its
credit and various specific revenues to the floating of about
; 25,000,000 of bonds bearing from 6 to 10 per cent. Sixty
miles of railway were built and 2,000 of expense money
reached Honduras. The remainder was eaten up in low
prices obtained for the bonds and in the "selling costs" in
London; the whole matter was the subject of a parlia-
mentary investigation in England. The debt is now being
settled on a small percentage basis by a special stamp tax,

Communications Railways 99

but principal and interest had increased to nearly ^30,000,-
ooo before the settlement was made. That is example enough
of the sacrifices the governments of Latin America were
once ready to make for railways, for it was duplicated in
various lesser ways throughout all the countries.

There are now about 75,000 miles of railway in the whole
vast area of Latin America. An astonishingly large propor-
tion of this mileage is> however, in strategic location and a
happily limited amount is in lines that parallel one another.
All but one national capital (the exception is Tegucigalpa,
Honduras) have rail connections, and the capitals are al-
most invariably cities of commercial importance. Bogota,
the capital of Colombia (of course in addition to Teguci-
galpa) is the only national capital and indeed one of the few
principal cities in Latin America which is not connected by
rail with the seacoast; its outlet is by rail for a portion of the
way and then by river or air northward or with a short gap
covered now by automobiles, by rail westward.

The history of railway building in Latin America goes
back to 1842, when the first concession was granted for a
railway from Vera Cruz, on the Gulf of Mexico, to Mexico
City, but only a few miles were then built. This was only
three years after work was commenced on the Baltimore
& Ohio, the first railway to be built in the United States.
Vicissitudes and difficulties were overcome, and a new
British concessionaire finished the Mexican Railway (the
"Queen's Own") through from Vera Cruz to the suburban
terminus of Mexico City in 1857. Meanwhile, work had
begun on the railways of Argentina, and in the next fifty
years most of the major construction of railways in Latin
America was carried out.

Today the railway systems of Latin America give seven /

ioo Greater America

distinct transcontinental routes, some of them with alter-
native terminii. The most northerly is in central Mexico, the
Gulf of Mexico terminii being Tampico and Vera Cruz, the
Pacific terminii Guaymas, Mazatlan and Manzanillo; the
neck of the bottle is the line through Guadalajara, over
which all this transcontinental travel must pass. A second
transcontinental line in Mexico is that across the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec from Puerto Mexico to Salina Cruz, once a
magnificent system with ample port facilities, now crum-
bled to ruin through disuse and revolution. The third line
is across Guatemala, the Caribbean terminus Puerto Barrios,
the Pacific terminii San Jose de Guatemala and Acajutla
and La Union, Salvador. The fourth is through Costa
Rica, from Port Limon on the Caribbean to Punta Arenas
on the Pacific. The Panama Railway is the fifth, from
Cristobal-Colon to Panama-Balboa. For the sixth we must
go far southward, to Bolivia, where the long line from Ar-
gentina was completed in 1925. Its Atlantic terminus is
Buenos Aires, its Pacific terminii Arica and Antofagasta,
Chile. The seventh and last is that formed by the linking
of the State Railways of Chile and the Buenos Aires and
Pacific Railway of Argentina by the Transandine Railway.

Only three of these transcontinental routes are standard
gauge lines, the two in Mexico and that in Panama. The
two in Central America are narrow gauge and those to the
south combinations of wide gauge, standard gauge and nar-
row gauge. While it is not an entirely fair comparison, it
is an index of national development to note that in Canada
and the United States, with vastly greater distances and
equal engineering difficulties, there are now, roughly com-
puted, ten independent transcontinental railway lines, in
about one-fourth the corresponding north-south distance.

There are, in the Latin American railway systems, only

Communications Railways 101

half a dozen international connections. The United States
and Mexico are connected at five points. Mexico and Gua-
temala are connected at one point, although no bridge now
exists to allow the crossing of the Suchiate River. Guate-
mala and Salvador can be visited across the line by rail, the
international railway link having been completed only in
1930 and serving most importantly as a rail outlet for El
Salvador to the Caribbean. There is now an international link
of narrow gauge railway between Venezuela and Colombia,
also of recent construction. Chile and Bolivia are linked,
and Bolivia and Argentina. Chile and Argentina are joined
by the tenuous Transandine. Paraguay and Uruguay are
linked, and Uruguay and Brazil by a distant frontier rail-
way. And that is all.

Yet one of the oldest dreams in Pan American relations
is the Pan American railway, linking the United States and
all the countries of the mainland of the hemisphere, a plan
proposed by James G. Elaine, then Secretary of State of the
United States, to the First Pan-American Congress in Wash-
ington in

The railway systems of Latin America have been exten-
sively described in various works. The series of brochures
published by the United States Department of Commerce
and noted' in the bibliography is most complete from every
angle. An inspiring tale of human ambition, sacrifice and
achievement is told in the history of virtually every railway
that has been built in these countries proof enough of it-
self to promise that peoples who can dream and sacrifice
as they have done for the very practical ideal of adequate
transportation can well carry far beyond even what has
been accomplished.

It cannot be overlooked, however difficult it may be to

102 Greater America

realize, that with all their shortcomings the railways of
Latin America do serve their territories well, within their
limitations and within the relatively small areas they have
opened up. There has been temptation, as these pages have
been written, to tell how well, and how difficult it was of
accomplishment. But suffice that the lesson lies plain before
us. It is the very theme of this book, that is that Latin
America, through all its difficulties, has in the past built and
is building soundly today its "plant" for a magnificent
future.

The period of highway building in Latin America began
in the same years as in the United States. This was follow-
ing the close of the Great War, when the use of motor
trucks and the limitless possibilities of passenger cars had
been demonstrated on the ancient roads of France. During
the years immediately following, the engineers and machin-
ery makers of the United States evolved, with considerable
rapidity, a type of highway construction that could be laid
in virgin territory, and yet would approximate the highways
of Europe, which had been built through centuries of
dumping gravel and broken rock and compacting it by the
traffic of carts and wagons. This contribution of North
American construction machinery and methods was the
definite impulse which began the era of highway building
in Latin America. Power shovels and scrapers, power roll-
ers and finally the intricate but magically effective con-
crete pavers and traveling mixer drums mounted on
trucks, made possible the highways and later the paved
roads and streets which cross Latin America today and are
pushing their way forward into newer fields each year.

There is no more thrilling picture of mechanical prog-
ress, as it spreads across the vast spaces of Latin America,

Communications Highways 103

than this scene of the building of the highways there. In
the first burst of construction from about 1920 to 1930, prob-
ably over 100,000 miles of good roads were built in Latin
America, a small but not inconsiderable portion of which
were hard-surfaced highways, including hundreds of miles
of the finest asphaltic macadam surfacing over a concrete
base.

Highways in Latin America have everywhere been re-
ceived with enthusiasm, for the search for sound trans-
portation is not new to Latin America. Spain, and the best
of the earlier viceroys, made gallant efforts to construct last-
ing trails for man and beast, the camino real or "royal high-
way" having been distinguished by flat, slippery cobble-
stones which were laid both to eliminate the mud of the
rainy season and, equally important, to prevent the luxu-
riant growth of the jungle from sweeping away every vestige
of the trail. Such causeways were built across the Isthmus
of Panama and throughout the colonies, and this type of
construction has come down to modern times. No one who
has not ridden the trails in the jungle where this simple
but expensive type of paving (or something more modern)
is not used can appreciate what a great step in progress even
that crude pavement was.

On unpaved trails where mules are used, the habit of that
usually sagacious animal, in treading as nearly as possible in
the exact footsteps of the animal that preceded him, cuts
the trails in the rainy season into a series of transverse
ditches filled with slimy mud. Into these ditches the mules
tread, day after day and week after week, until sometimes
the untrod ridges between stick high and dry above the
series of mudholes where the mules still travel, and where
horses must perforce follow them. In happier periods of
the year, travel over the so-called roads of fertile country

104 Greater America

regions results in deep cuts in the earth, until a road be-
comes a trench in the countryside, filled with flowing dust
when traffic passes and becoming roaring rivers in the rainy
season. In some portions of the tropics the carts which cut
these deep ravines carry conch-shells which are blown on
entering any particularly deep or winding chasm, to warn
any cart or motor car coming from the other direction, for
once met in these narrow passes, particularly with ox-carts,
there is no passing, and retreat is painfully difficult. Truly,
no region of the earth had better use for good roads than
Latin America. The lack of such facilities was, however,
common to the whole of the Americas, North and South,
and only the greater need emphasized any lack in the Latin
American countries.

The earlier enthusiasm for railways, which resulted in
the reckless pledging of national credit and yet achieved
the building of virtually all of the existing railways, was the
result in part of the realization that prior to the production
of the peculiarly American type of highway construction
machinery, or, say, 1920, actually no means existed for build-
ing good and smooth roads in any but the most rocky, and
therefore expensive, regions. The absence of motor trans-
port was of course a large determinant in the abandonment
of the idea of the old type of highways in favor of railways.
The great railway building era went far, as we have seen,
to break down the isolation within the various countries,
even if they did not often penetrate beyond the jealously
discussed frontiers. Railways alone seemed able, then, to
negotiate heights and distance and the treachery of jungle
and mountainside.

The building of railways slowed up and indeed almost
ceased when the construction of modern highways began,
but this has been a changing period in Latin America, and

Co mm u n icatio ns High w ays 105

the attitude toward the question is becoming one of con-
sidering transport and not highways or railways or rivers
alone. A few years ago, Colombia assembled a commission
of transportation experts from, abroad to study the national
problems and to consider particularly rivers, railways, roads
and the air in their relative importance to the whole trans-
portation problem, an attitude which has since borne the
fruit of example in other countries faced with somewhat
similar problems. Some countries, like Mexico, Cuba,
Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, have excel-
lent highway development plans and the others, in the
crucible of difficult financial times, in 1930 and the years
immediately following, have worked out an advancing co-
ordination plan. Colombia's solution in 1929-30 resulted
in a report with specific recommendations which has since
become the basis of the federal and state public works pro-
grams. There has been and will be waste in the highway
constructions of Latin America, but they are adding then-
bit to the advancement of civilization and to the extension
of the most precious of national assets transportation
in every one of the countries.

In the development of these highways many far-reaching
plans have been evolved. The Pan-American railway idea
has been transmuted into the idea of a Pan-American
highway, similar in location and similar in ideal. The Pan-
American railway plan has met many difficulties and so in
turn has the Pan-American highway. Until 1929, it was
largely a slogan sounded by North Americans, but at the
Second Pan-American Highway Congress in Rio de Janeiro
in that year, the subject was thoroughly aired and the frank
discussion resulted in a general agreement to influence the
location of highways as far as practicable so that they would

io6 Greater America

link with those of neighboring nations at the international
borders. Another agreement was that there need be no
single Pan-American highway, official while all others were
unofficial, but as many as might be desirable should be se-
lected and built. The aid of the United States was pledged
to the project and in 1929 an appropriation was made to
open an office of the Bureau of Public Roads in Panama to
aid, with surveys and advice, in the section of the Pan-
American highway lying between the southern border of
the United States and the Panama Canal.

The Pan-American highway, as indefinitely laid out, com-
prises the whole highway system of Canada that leads
toward the United States border, and of the United States
that leads to the Mexican border, and so on southward.
The border links are to be most important, and are being
solved as time goes on. There will also be the development
of whole new regions opened by these highways, built pri-
marily to meet an ideal of intercontinental traffic but prac-
tical, withal, in the national results that will be concomitant.
An example that may well become a reality before many
years is in Costa Rica. Heretofore this country has de-
veloped only along the railway line but, whem the highways
are opened to Panama and Nicaragua, we are sure to see a
new pioneering wave into the known but now inaccessible
rich valleys which such roads must traverse.

As for the future, there can be but one prediction, and
that almost a certainty. The highways of Latin America,
and particularly those of key countries like Argentina,
Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, are unquestionably destined
to an extension far beyond any possible estimate based on
those existent today. The richest portions of some of these
countries have yet to be opened, and highways are surest

Communications High ways 107

to lead the way in that opening. That the highway mile-
age, of roughly 100,000 miles usable by motor vehicles, will
probably be doubled by 1940 and multiplied many-fold as
decade follows decade, can be denied only if we envision
some other quite different means of transport. That there
will be a progressive improvement in types of highways is
inevitable, and the present system of building low-cost roads
first and improving them as time goes on, promises con-
tinuous road building everywhere throughout Latin Amer-
ica, just as in the United States and Canada.

It is the automobile for which the roads of the world are
being built and for which those of Latin America are
designed, both with a view to actual usage now and for
roughly estimated future needs. The motor vehicle is per-
haps more of a productive necessity in Latin America than
anywhere else in the world. Of the 850,000 automobiles
registered in Latin America, more than 200,000 are motor
trucks, that is, close to 20 per cent of the total, while in the
United States only 14 per cent of the motor vehicles regis-
tered are classified as trucks. It is also undoubtedly true
that a larger proportion than elsewhere of the so-called
pleasure cars are engaged in productive labor in Latin
America, as stagecoaches, busses, taxicabs and delivery
wagons, vehicles which work longer hours, often with two
drivers making continuous use of them, than in other coun-
tries. The demand for motor vehicles in Latin America
has outstripped all estimates and one country, Argentina,
ranks as the second largest market in the world for United
States automobiles, for the standard types of North Amer-
ican cars excel in demand all others in those markets. The
story of the winning of the jungle has been written wide
across the spaces with the old Model T Ford "touring" car.

io8 Greater America

That ancient vehicle persists to this day, a rugged servant
second only to the ox-cart in durability on unspeakable
roads and surpassed only by the mule in service and adapta-
bility. The picture of these battered vehicles is as essential
to any clear description of oil fields or mines or distant
pioneering in jungle or highland of Latin America as is the
story of the windmills to Don Quixote.

The automobile went to Latin America ahead of the
roads, and the increase in the use of these vehicles has had
its part, as everywhere, in the demand for new routes of
communication. In the years when Argentina, for in-
stance, was far behind in road construction, 80 per cent of
its 400,000 automobile registration was outside Buenos Aires,
where it would be natural to expect the largest use in the
country. These machines were serving the interior cities
and crossing the pampas without roads and often under
atrocious travel conditions. Everywhere the automobile has
penetrated and in far cities of Colombia which are inacces-
sible except to pack trains, automobiles taken apart and car-
ried on the backs of mules and re-assembled on arrival, find
their way across the ancient cobble pavements and even out
on short paved highways extending into the interior.

A people to whom the products of modern science and
manufacturing mean so much are not to be held back
from their development, even in so technical a matter as
road construction. Through the distant places of Latin
America roads have penetrated, and yet more will penetrate
increasingly as time goes on; there is no need to mark the
end, nor to try to grasp it. Communications are, to the
Latin Americans, the most vital part of their economic de-
velopment. They are hewing their own way through the
financial and commercial difficulties of attainment with the
same verve and force with which their ancestors made those

Communications A viation 109

appalling marches, in steel or cotton-padded armor, through
the jungle trails of the days of the Conquest.

In 1920, the Austrian head of one of the world's oldest
and most successful commercial aviation companies (that
operating the passenger and mail line on the Magdalena
River in Colombia) made the then perilous flight around
the edge of the Caribbean Sea to Havana and went to
Washington to negotiate for the United States air mail con-
tract. The then Postmaster General frankly told him that
there would be no mail contracts for foreign companies if
he could* help it, and as a result of his personal agitation, a
group of North Americans were induced, not without dif-
ficulty, to organize the Pan-American Airways. To that
organization was then given the first contracts for the carry-
ing of United States mail to Latin America. That was in
1927, and since that year the subsidies have been increased,
the mileage has spread out, and a rival company, the
"Nyrba," which planned to operate between the United
States and Buenos Aires down the East Coast of South
America in competition with the Pan-American on the
West Coast, has been absorbed. The first through mails
took ten days; that was in 1929, and they flew when and
if their luck was good. By 1931, the mail was traveling
regularly in seven days and in two years more, with night
flying, the trip could be cut to three days of elapsed time
a change indeed from the old days when three weeks was
excellent mail time by steamer.

The Pan-American Airways, operating in conjunction
with the Grace Steamship Lines, cover Mexico, Cuba, the
West Indies, all Central America and all of South Amer-
ica to Buenos Aires and Rio de laneiro. The lines circle
the Caribbean, touching at the islands and in Venezuela.

110 Greater America

Passenger service grew with the mail service, but the latter
pays the bills, under a subsidy which was arranged to pay
operating costs of the planes. The routes total 18,000 miles,
and eighteen of the twenty Latin American countries are
touched regularly.

In Colombia the Scadta (made up of the initials of its
Spanish name) operates its German planes with German
pilots, and flying low over the Magdalena River has had
virtually no accidents and even its now extended lines into
other points of Colombia have an enviable record to show
for aviation over as long a period as any continuous com-
mercial service in the world. The regular planes of this
service have revolutionized transport in Colombia, for the
normal running time of the river steamers, in good weather,
is eight to ten days from the coast to Girardot, a space cov-
ered in less than a day by the Scadta planes. The success
of this excellently organized enterprise is one of the out-
standing features of aviation history. Its ships cover,
roughly, about 5,000 miles a week. Another German
company, the Condor Syndicate, has had important con-
tracts along the Brazilian coast between Natal, where the
fast European mail ships make their first stop in Brazil, and
Rio de Janeiro, into the interior of Brazil and down to
Argentina.

,The first and most important aviation contacts of South
America with Europe were made, however, through the
French-owned and operated Compagnie Generale Aero-
postale which early established a weekly service between
Paris, France, and Santiago, Chile, touching at the important
cities in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina en route. There
were 3,500 miles of this route in South America, and the
contact with Europe was established by the steamers plying
between Natal, Brazil, and Dakar, West Africa, where the

Communications A riation m

French air mail service picked up the air mail from and
delivered it to the mail steamer. This service was designed
to be all-air, including the section across the South Atlantic.
This would make the air mail time from Paris or London
to Buenos Aires about four days (with the steamer it was
eleven) and would be the motivating cause of the operation
of the Pan-American planes in night service to bring Buenos
Aires to within three days of New York. The Aeropostale
carried mail and passengers from Buenos Aires to Asun-
cion, Paraguay, and southward along the coast of Argentina.
It had a connection to Venezeula, linking in with the trans-
Atlantic steamers.

The Chilean National Airways, covering the 2,600 miles
of Chile's length, carries mail throughout the country.
The Lloyd Aero Boliviana flies over 2,300 miles of routes,
although irregularly. The Peruvian Naval Air Service and
the Fawcett Aviation Company early covered interior Peril,
and reached over the Andes to the city of Iquitos, at the
head of navigation of the Amazon, in a few hours. Only
a few years ago, the quickest way to get from Lima to
Iquitos was to go by way of the Panama Canal, around the
northern edge of the continent, and 2,500 miles up the
Amazon!

The list of the aerial services in South America changes
with startling rapidity in these days, and a recording of the
mere names gives but a brief idea of what they have done
and where they may be going. In Mexico, a national air
service supplements the service of the Pan-American Air-
ways, flying into sections of the country not reached by the
trunk lines; it covers close to 5,000 miles, a formidable serv-
ice for Mexico. In Central America, whose life has been
transformed by the coming of the planes of the Pan-Amer-
ican, some local and national services are established.

1 12 Greater A merica

The airplane, coming to Latin America with its limited
transportation facilities of the past and the slow, plodding
time which travel has taken through the centuries, is one of
the supreme boons of the modern age. The airplane has
been said to bring more to undeveloped lands than to those
that have their communications more fully advanced; cer-
tainly this is true in Latin America. The planes, flying over
the sandy beaches, have thus in many sections their own
airways laid out for them, but they leap the Andes and fly
over the tropical jungles with equal daring, and generally
with equal safety. Along the coasts of the tropical regions,
in fact, beaches are few and the vegetation comes to the
water's edge over hundreds of miles of the coast. The cost
of erecting beacons alone has been a tremendous handicap
to the development of night flying, but these have been
built with greater rapidity than would have been guessed
by the most sanguine optimist at the beginning of airplane
service. As a rule, the governments of Latin America have
not yet assumed the responsibility of lighting and marking
the air lanes, or of furnishing landing fields, as is done by
the Federal Government or local enterprise in the United
States. However, high rates for the carrying of air mail
prevail, as do generous mail subsidies, and the companies
receive their operating costs and in many cases enough to
progress steadily with the development of their own
ground facilities.

The revolution in custom and business practice in the
countries of Latin America has been notable with the in-
troduction of the air mail. Banking has been speeded, and
the fast handling of documents in trade and of articles of
trade indeed, have become commonplaces since the air mail
was introduced. When the air mail time between Buenos
Aires and New York had been cut to a week, it became

Comm unications A viation 1*3

possible to exchange letters twenty-five times a year as
against the maximum of nine times a year by steamer mail
at the old sailing time. The possibility of sending documents
to a consignee by air mail instead of by the next steamer
has eliminated many of the old difficulties of trade when
such documents had to follow a week behind at the earliest.
Every element of trade is using air mail increasingly, and
will yet expand.

The use of the air services for passenger traffic has grown
by leaps and bounds, in Latin America. Between the coun-
tries of Central America, once separated by days of travel
by sea or across the long trails by horseback, a jump of an
hour or two at most links all the capitals and principal
towns. In South America the same great advantages exist
in many sections. The air mail and passenger service has
made it possible to bring residents of distant places on the
coasts or in the Andes to the facilities of the large cities in a
few hours, in case of serious sickness a service which has
been emphasized more than once to the residents of those
once isolated regions in a way that is not forgotten. It is
possible with air service for instance, to leave almost a week
after the steamer has sailed from Santiago, Chile, and over-
take the same boat in Lima; it is this facility which has in-
duced experienced steamship lines to ally themselves with
the Pan-American Airways.

The future of aviation in Latin America is dazzling.
Every long-distance flight anywhere in the world, every tri-
umph of endurance, every proof that planes are safer and
surer, advances by many fold the day when airplanes shall
conquer Latin American distance, not only for the 1 few but
for all Distance has for the four centuries of American
history been the greatest enemy of every dream or plan of
progress or peace in every one of the countries from North

ii4 Greater America

to South. Distance and time, and comfort, these aviation
is annihilating year by year and month by month. There
is already no spot in Latin America that is inaccessible, save
only the jungle where no man has happened to clear a
space large enough for a landing field; the streets of mis-
erable villages were proven to be adequate in an emergency
to planes of the United States Marines in Nicaragua as early
as 1927. By plane, men have explored in five years more
of the Amazon than four centuries had described effectively
before. Most of the disputed lines of national boundaries
have been resolved, since 1923, by airplane photographic
surveys over trackless jungles; crests of ranges that no man
could survey the aerial camera has located beyond dispute
and has thus resolved a dozen potential causes of interna-
tional strife.

The radio has linked the nations of the Americas as it
has linked no other group of nations anywhere else in the
world. In its earliest development as a competitor to the
cables for commercial messages, one of the first world-wide
operating arrangements in the history of commercial radio
telegraphy was worked out in Latin America between the
Radio Corporation of America and the various European
companies. In the development of radio telephony, the link
between New York and Buenos Aires was second only to
that between New York and Europe. In radio broadcast-
ing, the fact that the north-south waves travel at the same
hours, and that night (the surest and safest period for
broadcasting, and for the largest audiences) is the same
throughout all the Americas, have tended to make the radio
links closer as each year passes.

Again, as in aviation, the changes and advances are so
rapid that it is of no significance to record what has been

Communications Radio 115

the furthest step that has been taken as this is written, or as
the last opportunity to correct and bring down to date may
allow. Short-wave broadcasting from the United States
Navy station in Washington and from two great commer-
cial stations elsewhere in the United States was developed
on a regular basis as early as 1926, well-designed Spanish
programs were in vogue by 1928, and by 1930 these were
considered of vital importance in the foreign relations of
the two great electric companies which sanctioned them
and paid their not inconsiderable bills, while the Pan-
American Union's broadcasts over the Naval station had
become an established institution throughout the hemi-
sphere. But as this phase advanced slowly, there grew to a
swelling chorus the radio broadcasting industry of Latin
America, and more and more the programs from the United
States and those from Latin America (down to Buenos
Aires and Santiago de Chile) came to be heard in distant
places at the opposite ends of the Americas. Havana and
Mexico came to be outstanding features in the listening of
the North, and "Amos 'n Andy," at the height of their
popularity, were listened to in Brazil and in Argentina.
What had once been freak luck became a commonplace
and where in 1924 the cheering (but not the speeches) from
the Democratic Convention in New York could be distin-
guished, with a little imagination, at a single tiny station
on the top of the Andes, in 1931, a little broadcasting sta-
tion in Buenos Aires was cheered with "fan mail" from
Massachusetts, and "the smallest radio station in the world,"
at Heredia, Costa Rica, was known to hundreds of listeners
in the far corners of the globe, and a book, in quaintest
English, was written for its widespread coterie of friends.
The radio has grown in popularity, both through its nov-
elty and through, in the later years, its advancing value to

* 16 Greater A rnerica

hearers and broadcasters. In the export year of 1931, for
instance, radio almost alone of all items climbed steadily,
trebling its figures each year. Argentina attained a record
of a million radio receiving sets by the end of 1931, and the
first forty kilowatt broadcasting station was opened in South
America (Buenos Aires) in the same year. Six years before,
the music from the great Colon opera in Buenos Aires had
begun its broadcasting, the first broadcasting in the world
of the full performance of opera or play, and it was being
listened to in Chile across the Andes, and in Brazil far to
the North.

Radio is perhaps more a cultural link than a phase of
communications, but its place is certainly in the chapter de-
voted to the marvelous strides that have been made in the
means and the achievement of links of nation to nation and
people to people. The great events of every nation in the
Americas are broadcasted, the declarations of presidents
and the speeches of visiting princes. Music has long flowed
through the ether for, beginning in 1926, as noted, the
United States Naval Broadcasting Station sent, on short
wave-length, the music of Latin America, played in the
patio of the Pan-American Union in Washington, up and
down the continent.

That north-and-south traffic has a significance that can
hardly be over-emphasized. The belt of night and day,
and hour by hour, travels evenly across the Americas.
Every city of importance in Latin America wakes and
works and sleeps at the same hour as some great city in the
United States or Canada. The radio, of an evening, reaches
the people of the hemisphere at the same hour, and at the
same moments in the round of their days. Links like those
are beyond evaluation, beyond prediction of what they will

Communications Telegraphs 117

do in drawing the nations closer together and in unifying
their thought and their action in years to come.

The telegraph systems of Latin America were early
developed, and they constitute perhaps the most complete
of all the means of communications in those lands. Argen-
tina, for instance, has slightly more miles of telegraphs per
hundred of population (1.9) than the United States (1.8),
while Chile (1.4) and Costa Rica (1.2) are close to the fig-
ure by which we must, perforce, judge the other nations of
the Americas. In virtually every one of the countries, the
telegraphs are government services, relatively cheap, prob-
ably unprofitable, but strictly controlled and in time of
trouble sharply censored. The cables in some countries
have their private lines from the coast to the centers of
population, as in Mexico, where the Mexican Telegraph
Company, one of the oldest foreign communication systems,
has long had its own wires into Mexico City from Vera
Cruz, the cable landing. In Argentina and Chile, the All
America Cables has its own lines across the Andes, guaran-
teeing service continuously.

In other countries the government holds a firm hand
over outside communications, like the radio in Tegucigalpa,
Honduras, where all messages must be filed with the na-
tional telegraphs, and transmitted over these lines to the
radio station in the suburbs, although the wise foreigner
with a message in another language than Spanish will, for
accuracy, arrange to send a copy direct to the radio station,
although filing and paying the high rate demanded by the
national telegraphs. Incidentally, the telegraphs in Central
America are so arranged amongst the five countries there
that one may send, for half a United States cent a word, a

1 18 Greater America

message from any one to any of the other countries over the
national lines. The price is thus lower than similar dis-
tances could be covered in the United States by telegraph,
and the service is fair.

The control of telegraphs by the government is a factor
in the status of communications that is not to be over-
looked, and although the lines are often old, often strung
through the jungle not on poles but on forest trees subject
to storm and wind, this means of progress deserves high
praise.

The telephone, save as a means of purely local communi-
cation, is of recent development in Latin America. As in
the United States and Canada the telephone in Latin
America began as a local enterprise, and was for years con-
fined to the towns where it was first installed. Later the
Ericsson (Swedish) Company invaded the field and met the
interests of the International Telephone and Telegraph
Company in competition. In 1931, these two were merged
and the telephone became in Latin America, as it has most
profitably become elsewhere, a monopoly under strict
and often very strict government supervision. Argen-
tina had, in 1930, 793,000 miles of telephone wire, and 262,-
ooo telephones or 2.34 per hundred of population, as com-
pared with the United States with 3,983,000 miles of tele-
phone wire and 1,405,000 instruments, or 14.34 P er hundred
of population. Brazil had 320,000 miles of telephone wire
and 145,000 instruments. Cuba came next with 256,000
miles of wire, and 77,000 instruments or 2.13 per hundred
of population, while Mexico was fourth with 239,000 miles
of wire and 82,000 instruments (0.50 per hundred of popu-
lation).

Com m un icatio ns Cables 1 19

By 1931, there was radiotelephone communication with
Europe and the United States from Mexico, Cuba, Argentina,
Chile, Venezuela and other Latin American countries, and
the end of expansion was far distant. Chile, Argentina and
Uruguay were linked up by long distance telephone cables.
The combination of the Ericsson telephones with the In-
ternational, a New York company, promised vast develop-
ments and a heavy investment of capital, a contribution of
North American capital and enterprise with local interests
which is one of the promising signs of closer relationships
and greater good will

The most romantic story in connection with communica-
tions has been left to the last. This is the bare record of the
development of the cables. Starting with the line to Vera
Cruz, Mexico, from Galveston, Texas, the company which
is now known as the All America Cables has built, in a
quarter of a century, one of the most potent links between
Latin America and the United States. The Galveston-Vera
Cruz cable has been sold to the Western Union Telegraph
Company, the All America has come under the control of
the International Telephone and Telegraph and thus of the
Postal Telegraph system, but its service has been pushed
and its rates lowered consistently in Latin America. Today
it is as cheap to send a message from Europe to Latin
America via New York as it is direct, and the rates to and
from Latin America and the United States and Canada are
lower in proportion than those between any similarly im-
portant areas in the world.

The Eastern Telegraph Company of England has had
cables to South America for many years. When the pres-
ent All America Cables laid its first lines, it could compete
only on the West Coast, far distant from the European

120 Greater A merica

headquarters of the Eastern. It reached, finally, across the
Andes from Chile into Argentina, fought in the courts for
permission and finally laid its cables at night from Argen-
tina to Uruguay, and in order to enter Brazil, because of
the Eastern's monopoly of intra-coastal traffic, in 1919 laid
two long cables from Montevideo, one to Rio de Janeiro and
the other to Santos and Sao Paulo, with no connection be-
tween the two. These great extensions brought its total
mileage from 14,000 prior to 1914 up to 24,000 in 1930, and
the rates were reduced from the competitive price set by the
Eastern before the War, of around $3 per word, to 50
cents a word from Buenos Aires to New York, 10 cents a
word for press and a corresponding rate for private week-
end cable letters, a service unknown before.

Nowhere in all the trade contests with Europe has the
battle been more openly bitter than between the Eastern
and the All America. During the War, the Eastern sought
to bring its cables ashore in the United States against the
express orders of the Navy Department, only to be frus-
trated by cutters on the watch. There is no false-face in the
battle of communciations.

So the links within the countries of Latin America, and
between them and the great world, are being forged slowly
but progressively. There is a thrill comparable to no other
phase of inter-American relations in the linking of nation
and nation, and in the simplification of friendship that
comes through those easier communications. The airplanes
with mail and passengers will fly in three days from Buenos
Aires to New York within a brief lapse of time. Cables to-
day have made communication easy and cheap. In the sud-
den crises of 1931, the radio telephone made it possible to
talk face to face across the spaces and emphasized, more

Communications Cables 121

than men had ever realized before, that time was the same
throughout the Americas, and that a call from New York
or New Orleans to Buenos Aires or Rio or Santiago found
the recipient at his desk as was he who called. The radio,
with programs popular throughout the Americas, flashes the
music of the dinner hour to Latin America as to Canada,
and he who plays in the mysteries of the short wave can
listen to Bogota or to Buenos Aires as easily as to the
amateur station in his own city. That "smallest radio sta-
tion in the world," at Heredia, Costa Rica, heard and
known wherever boys (or men or women) tuned into the
lower reaches of the radio scale, was the symbol of a friend-
ship that was at last beginning to find its medium.

North and south move the waves of communication by air
and by sea and by radio and some day by rail and by road.
Twenty-five years will see vast changes in every field, a
quarter-century in which communications now in their in-
fancy will begin to realize their full power. The symbolism
is sure, and all the future relations of the Americas will
move in rhythm with their growth.

Chapter VI
THE UNFOLDING OF ECONOMIC POWER

THE past in Latin America has seen the development, almost
alone, of produce for export. Except for crude foods,
clothing and shelter, the concentration has been on the "cash
crops" of the farmer, rancher and woodsman and, for the
miner, on the precious metals or the minerals used in the
industries of the foreign world. The future promise of eco-
nomic unfoldment lies in the direction of wider production
for home needs and in additional local preparation of raw
materials before exporting. This does not mean a decrease
in export totals; rather the contrary. But it does mean the
upbuilding, from within the populations there, of their own
resources of wealth and independence and of that higher
standard of living which is the hope alike of themselves and
of those who trade with them.

The world crisis which began in the closing months of
1929 has probably caused a deeper change in economic life
and in the direction of commercial effort in Latin America
than in any other region of the globe. In those months of
falling prices for raw commodities, Latin American nations
awoke violently to the realization (which had been bearing
in on some of their wiser economists for many years) that
there was no reservoir of national strength in an economic
life that was dependent almost entirely on foreign sales and
on purchases abroad of most of the manufactured necessities
of modern life. The stirring, throughout all those nations,
of interest in manufacturers, in small industries and in ex-
tensions of the extractive industries to partial manufacture,
became evident in many directions. The study of industrial

122

The Unfolding of Economic Power 123

technique developed expansively. The purchase of shop
and factory equipment abroad slowly increased despite dif-
ficulties of exchange with which to pay for them. The orgy
of new tariffs to supplement falling government revenues
was marked by often unstudied and unwise restrictions on
certain manufactured goods that ambitious politicians felt
could be forced as home industries. Most significant of all,
rising tariffs on finished products in general left the old
duties on industrial machinery untouched, or lowered them;
an increased duty on shoes would be promulgated in the
same decree with a reduction in the duty on shoemaking
machinery and materials. Some countries sought to force
the development of industry in new directions, by putting
embargoes on machinery, like textile mill equipment in
Brazil, for industries that were considered already over-
developed, but adding, in the same gesture, wide encourage-
ment for machinery imports for new lines of enterprise.
Other countries, like Cuba, reduced all duties on all ma-
chinery destined for the establishment of new industries.
Crude, sometimes definitely dangerous, were these proced-
ures but they indicated that sharp break away from the
past of exploitation which is perhaps the most significant
and lasting change in world economy that has come from
the lessons of the great depression.

Those changes are a definite link, also, with the United
States and with Canada, whence come the tools and sinews
of the "economic autonomy" of the future of Latin Amer-
ica. In the two great Anglo-Saxon nations of North Amer-
ica are created the machinery for this industrial expansion.
In Canada also have been built the branch factories which
are one of the steps in the economic growth hoped for in
every country of Latin America. From Canada and the
United States come also the capital with which these things

1^4 Greater A merica

may be brought, not merely into being, but later into fuller
flower. The Greater America is in the building in this field
more than anywhere else. The United States and Canada
do not, as economic units at any rate, seek to furnish Latin
America with the goods that Latin America can itself man-
ufacture. The cheap goods of low cost production have
been gradually passing from the list of trade items between
North and South America over many years, and there is a
growing realization that there will be, in the coming gen-
erations, a greater and a more normal interchange between
Latin and Saxon America than between Latin America and
Europe. The "specialties," the product of mass manufac-
ture like automobiles, and above all machinery evolved in
the long and complicated industrial history of the North,
are the bases for this interchange.

A great economic principle is also exported from the
United States, and from Canada, to Latin America. Saxon
America has built, and now builds, its economic power on
the development of its markets through the larger prosper-
ity and purchasing power of its customers, abroad as at
home. Europe, by contrast, has since the beginning of its
commercial history, founded its trade primarily on the com-
mercial exploitation of alien peoples; this has certainly been
the principle, at least, of its commercial expansion of the
past. In its treatment of colonies and of the new nations,
Europe has sought to keep the peoples of these regions as
far as possible in a dependent relationship, at first politically
and later economically (or vice versa) by maintaining them
in the relation of producers of raw materials and foodstuffs
to exchange for manufactured goods. The relationship is
supposed to be inherent in geography and populations, and
the Americas all to be at the raw materials end of the ar-
rangement. The American nations, north and south, are

The Unfolding of Economic Power 125

however of the new age where natural development can
sometimes be delayed or diverted, but cannot be destroyed,
even in four centuries.

How deep has gone the sentiment for economic inde-
pendence and the creation of new forces within the life of
the Latin American nations is a subject for postulation
rather than definite measurement. The persistent demand
for "economic autonomy" has been sounding in Argentina,
for instance, since about 1924. Cuba, since about the same
time, has been encouraging crop diversification as a national
policy, with increasing production of foods which were
once largely imported. Cuban manufacture has been stimu-
lated, both by the freeing of much labor from the sugar
fields and by protective tariffs which, as noted above, allow
the importation of industrial machinery free of duty for
new enterprises. For a century, such concentratedly one-
crop countries as Costa Rica (where the entire national en-
ergy is devoted to the raising of coffee, excepting for the
circumscribed banana industry on the Caribbean coast)
have imported nearly all the food they consume. Cattle
from Nicaragua, beans and rice from El Salvador, have
been typical of the foods that might be produced in their own
valleys, for these items come from countries with climates
like Costa Rica itself. That is changing gradually, and
must change, as suggested elsewhere in these pages. The
greater the home production, if only of the foods consumed,
the more wealth remains for expenditure on more special-
ized products of other lands, including those of Nicaragua
and El Salvador which apparently would suffer from this
change.

The Latin American countries thus emerge, even agri-
culturally, as areas of the earth where the development of

Greater A merica

a genuine and sincere nationalism in production is not
and will not be destructive to world advancement. Many
mistakes will be made, as they have already been made, in
the efforts to help and to encourage home development
along new lines, but the tendency to create greater individ-
ual prosperity and through that prosperity greater economic
power is slowly but certainly forward. It marks a sharp
break from the past of exploitation that carries with it a new
hope for the whole world.

We shall see, in the next chapter, just how the plantation
system, on which the whole of the agricultural economy of
Latin America has been based, is passing. It has been
wrecked, not by a civil war such as swept away the planta-
tion era in the southern United States, but by the logical
development of its own and the world's balance of eco-
nomic forces. Based on the false premise of abundant
labor, it has chained the workers it had to low wage scales
because plantation crops have of necessity to be produced
with much wastage of labor and, therefore, with low return
to that labor. Falling commodity prices, the failure of
efforts at monopolies in its products, the competition of
abundant labor and more modern methods in Asia and
Africa these have combined to end the era of plantation
development in Latin American agriculture. But the great
food crops, capable of production on a machine-age scale
and with modern machines and methods, offer a definite
alternative in the agricultural field.

Beyond this, however, the future of Latin America
stretches in two other directions. One is mining, the other
is industry.

The earliest activities, outside warfare, into which the
Spaniards entered in Latin America were the extraction of

The Unfolding of Economic Power 127

precious minerals. The gold and silver hordes of the In-
dians were torn from them, by direct military assault, by
thievery, by torture and as ransom for their chieftains. Pi-
zarro demanded that a room be filled with gold and silver,
as a ransom for the Inca Atahualpa; the bare records indi-
cate that this gift was worth over $15,000,000. The Span-
iards in Mexico inflicted horrible tortures on the Aztec
king Cuauhtemoc to obtain the secret of gold stores whose
location he quite likely did not know. The list is endless,
but probably not half of the gold treasure of the Indians
was ever recovered by the Spaniards. There is little doubt,
for instance, that in Peru and Ecuador much of the gold
that trickles into the markets from the Indians of today
comes from priceless gold ornaments of royal graves or for-
gotten treasure troves which when found today are melted
down or filed to dust to simulate recent washings from the
streams, because ancient ornaments would be subject to con-
fiscation as national treasures.

There was every indication, to the Spaniards, of unlim-
ited sources of gold and silver and most of their wars
and explorations were to find those sources, the mines and
streams from which the treasures had come. In these ex-
plorations and in the scouring of the country by Spanish
adventures who were the early prototype of the prospector,
mines of gold and silver were located in virtually every
region where mining is known today. Some notable
bonanza mines have! been opened since their day, but these
have almost without exception been found by accident or as
a result of deep digging in properties that appeared to be
of only minor importance.

Latin America, especially Mexico and Peru, continues to
produce gold and silver, but the quantity of gold since the
Spanish Conquest has not been a great factor in world fi-

1^8 Greater America

nance and the silver, excepting in Mexico (the second silver-
producing country in the world after the United States), is
not a vital element. The wonderful silver mines of Bolivia
(Upper Peru in the days of the Spaniards) have virtually
all of them been worked out or have run into tin; in the
great Bolivian tin boom of 1922 to 1928, the most important
new prospects for tin were abandoned Spanish mines
whence silver had been taken until the tin content of the
ore became so heavy that the Spaniards, who had but lim-
ited use for tin, were forced to abandon the workings.
Gold certainly exists in Bolivia, however, and in unopened
regions in Brazil a vast reservoir of mineral wealth has only
begun to be tapped. The third precious metal of modern
commerce, platinum, was early found in Colombia, and is
today mined there with profit. To the Spaniards it was not
a precious metal, and it was not sought by prospectors. In-
deed amongst the curious tales of ancient days are those of
the hanging of counterfeiters (this was always a capital
crime in the colonies) who had made "silver" pesos out of
platinum.

Most of the metals of industry have been mined in Latin
America on a small scale in the past, but their broad de-
velopment has been in recent years. Copper is found the
length of the hemisphere, and is mined in every way known
to engineers, from the immense open-cut mining with
power shovels at Chuquicamata, Chile (where electrolytic
copper is produced at what is said to be one of the lowest
net costs in the industry) to the cold heights of the Andes in
Peru, where the Cerro de Pasco Company operates one of
the most extensive and modern deep mining enterprises in
the world. There is iron in Mexico, Chile and Brazil, in
profitable deposits, but the lack of good coal has delayed
development of local steel industries, although these same

The Unfolding of Economic Power 129

countries all have poor coal and, already or in process of
organization, small steel companies. Coal mined in the
high Andes of Peru is used by the Cerro de Pasco mines.
It may indicate yet other mountain deposits, but as yet only
Mexico, Chile and Brazil have commercial coal workings,
and none of these of the finest grades.

Petroleum has become one of the great extractive indus-
tries of Latin America. First in Mexico, beginning early
in the present century, the industry grew until Mexico was
second only to the United States in oil production, and
furnished immense quantities to the Allied Navies during
the war. Legislation restricting further development drove
the oil companies out of Mexico after the Constitution of
1917 and Venezeula, in 1929, took second place in world oil
production. Colombia has developed notable oil resources,
held back from full exploitation by restrictive legislation
which was not revised until 1931, after Venezuela had wel-
comed, and received, most of the North American oil in-
vestment which had left Mexico. Peru early developed its
petroleum, and Argentina has opened extensive fields which
are being jealously guarded as a national resource.

The oil deposits in the eastern sections of Bolivia have
been explored sufficiently to prove their existence and rick-
ness; they will be a great resource when the exhaustion of
fields closer to consumption or to seaboard have been de-
pleted. Much of the asperity in the relations between Bo-
livia and Paraguay over the boundary of those two coun-
tries in the soKralled Grand Chaco has undoubtedly been
due to anticipations of oil discoveries. Trinidad, the British
island off the coast of Venezeula, has been the source of
asphalt for generations, and its immense asphalt lake is, of
course, a heavy oil "seepage" on a grand scale. There have
been traces of oil in other portions of Latin America, and

*3 Greater America

there is no doubt that petroleum will serve, in years to
come, as one of the main local sources of power in Latin
American countries. It is safe also to predict that the oil
resources will all be carefully guarded and to a large extent
used for the development of the economic importance of
the country where they lie, not given free to the world on
an exploitation basis.

Brazil, which was not developed so intensively by the
Portuguese as were the other colonies of Latin America by
the Spaniards, remains today one of the mighty mineral
storehouses of the world. The lack of complete surveys or
exploration leaves such a statement uncorroborated, but the
list of minerals now produced on a small scale runs virtually
the whole list, from diamonds to iron. The vast Brazilian
state of Minas Geraes (whose name translates to the grand-
iloquent phrase "Mines in General") produces already a
number of minerals, and states its claim to almost the entire
list. Brazilian manganese, used in immense quantities dur-
ing the war, when high prices of extraction and transporta-
tion could be paid, indicates the situation; costs in unde-
veloped countries are always a deterrent to the development
of properties that would become only marginal producers
under normal conditions. It is possible that the Amazon
region, as yet unexplored even on the surface, may have
both coal and oil.

Peru, like Brazil, is rich in every type of mineral the
Peruvians claim that every kind of metal, almost without ex-
ception, has been found there. It is the chief world pro-
ducer of vanadium, for instance. The Andean region, in
general, is safely to be judged one of the world's richest un-
touched storehouses of mineral wealth. While it is dotted
with mines of every sort, from the emeralds and the plati-
num of Colombia to the coal out under the ocean floor of

The Unfolding of Economic Power 131

Chile, its possibilities are certainly barely known. In the
coming quarter of a century, mineral after mineral may
become an important item in mining production in South
America, as the prices and the need of each make such de-
velopments financially feasible.

Nor are the minerals in Latin America's list limited to
the metals and oil and coal. The nitrate fields of Chile
produce an immense portion of the commerce of that coun-
try, furnishing basic mineral salts for the fertilizers of the
world, and for its gunpowder. Iodine and borax come, too,
from the Chilean desert, the one a by-product, the other an
extraction from regions not identified with the nitrate des-
ert. Sulphur is produced in a dozen volcanoes and in deep
mines. The list goes on, but this is not the place, nor is
there room, to retail the figures. The excellent economic
geographies listed in the bibliography fill in, thrillingly, the
details of the picture which is broadly painted in here.

The significant part of the mining wealth and develop-
ment of Latin America, for the sake of our study here, is
that it is so distinctly a product of the co-operation of Saxon
America. Canadian and United States machinery, capital
from these two countries overwhelmingly, and engineers
born or able natives trained in the North, have so far been
the chief instruments in the mining development of Latin
America. Without these aids there would be mining, but
it would be the primitive mining of the Spaniards and of
the Indians before them, often petering out before the large
ore bodies might be found, honeycombing the hills yet
wasting all but an infinitesimal part, the richest ores, be-
cause only those could be transported to the market-place.
Most of that sort of mining was exhausted before the end
of the Spanish colonial era, and would have meant nothing

Greater A merica

in the economics of the period of independence, excepting
for modern, large-scale development. Bonanzas, of course,
would continue to be found, and gold washings that indi-
viduals could carry out alone, while precious stones would
have been unearthed and brought to the centers. But min-
ing, as a contributor to employment, to foreign exchange
and trade, and to national revenue, would have been non-
existent.

How valuable to the nation is the establishment of an
extractive industry like mining, which takes immense
riches from the soil and leaves only wages and taxes, and
some profit from the supply of foodstuffs, is a question that
has agitated Latin American statesmen for three genera-
tions. They have classified mining with the plantation sys-
tem of agriculture in its lack of extensive profits for the in-
dividual or for the nation. Labor has certainly been taken
from other employment to serve in the mines and oil fields,
but so at other times have the workers been taken from the
fields and towns for public works, in both cases to the in-
crease of wages and bettered living conditions. Mining has
never produced a great percentage of profit for modern gov-
ernment anywhere, excepting through taxes, and the ex-
haustion of mineral resources as a form of loss of national
wealth has been a subject of economic debate for consider-
ably longer than the subject has bothered Latin American
political leaders. It seems safe to record that as a means
for the production of wealth, and when machinery is used
extensively enough to take the chief burden off human
labor, mining can properly be counted as one of the im-
portant elements in the momentum of the advance of the
peoples of Latin America into their role as a part of
Greater America and of the modern world.

The Unfolding of Economic Power 133

The development of Latin American mining through the
increasing use of modern extractive machinery certainly
compares with the romances of business anywhere. Year
by year and generation by generation conditions in old min-
ing regions have been improved by the use of new equip-
ment and new methods. Cerro de Pasco, in 1927, set aside
$25,000,000 out of its undivided surplus earnings to be spent
on a power plant and for a tunnel deep below the present
workings, a superb gesture that is but part of a series of
such moves in the history of this great company. In Chile,
in our lifetime, the great copper properties have been de-
veloped, both in the snowy heights at Sewall and on the
ghastly desert at Chuquicamata. The former was a new,
clean-cut mining development by the Braden company, in
which the most modern machinery, in mine, mill and
smelter, was installed at the start and has been kept up to
date, as in any great modern mining property anywhere.
At Chuquicamata the romance was more startling, for this
property was built complete, solely on engineers' surveys.
Before the vast open-cut mining system was devised and the
magnificent mill and the power plant at the seaboard were
designed and built, the only mining there was in a few
ancient shafts going below the low grade surface ores and
operating on a limited, small-profit scale. Chuquicamata
was the dream of an engineer who knew Miami and the
Utah Copper Company methods and Andes Copper was
organized and set to work to duplicate their conditions and
their profit and did.

The story of Chilean nitrate is another romance of engi-
neering and machinery. The nitrate, which lies in thick
broken blocks just below the surface of the sand, has for
generations been extracted by digging it out with pick and
shovel and dynamite, boiling a solution made from the

134 Greater A m erica

caliche so obtained, and thus crystallizing out the nitrate
and shipping it in bags to the sea. It was immensely profit-
able, for it was the only large source in the world. With
the coming of synthetic nitrogen, as the result of Germany's
efforts to produce its own nitrogen bases for gunpowder and
fertilizer during the war, and the overproduction even in
Chile as a result of war demands, this monopoly faded and
the life of the industry was actually threatened. It was
saved, not at first by consolidations such as came later, but
by the introduction of a new process and with it what
was of chief importance, perhaps a whole-souled turning
to machinery for the reduction of costs. Power shovels
were introduced to dig the caliche, motor trucks and rail-
ways with electric or storage battery engines came to handle
it to the plants, themselves equipped with every modern
device to speed and economize the treatment, and finally the
nitrate was turned into round, glazed, shot-like globules
which do not fuse together and therefore can go in bulk
shipments even by sea. The nitrate industry of Chile has
buttressed itself behind the ramparts of machinery and
engineering for the battle of the next few years with the
synthetic product of Germany.

Petroleum development has, of course, been made possible
on the broad scale of its present development by modern
engineering and machinery, pipe lines and tankships. The
extractive industries, typified by mining, are building a solid
bulwark of wealth and revenue for the future in Latin
America, soundly on the achievements of engineering and
machines. In this development, an increasing number of
Latin American engineers are taking part. Engineering stu-
dents constitute almost 75 per cent of the Latin Americans
in the universities of the United States and Canada, and the
local universities of Latin America are giving increasing at-

The Unfolding of Economic Power 135

tention to the demands of students for engineering courses
and to the opportunities of a great part in national develop-
ment for those who so prepare themselves.

In the ten years following the close of the Great war,
Latin America absorbed over $750,000,000 worth of indus-
trial machinery, a classification which does not include auto-
mobiles, agricultural implements, locomotives or office and
household appliances. The United States supplied more of
this classification of machinery to Latin America than it
did to any other section of the world, including Europe of
course. The annual total virtually doubled from $35,000,-
ooo in 1923 to $64,000,000 in 1929. The classification in-
cluded mining, petroleum, power-generating equipment,
pumps, sugar machinery, equipment for factories and shops,
and construction machinery.

All this has entered into the permanent "plant'* of these
countries, and has been used, in part, for the construction
of railways, highways, streets and buildings. It has been
used, too, not only in the extractive industries, like mining
and petroleum developments, but in the creation of factor-
ies which add definite values to raw materials before they
are exported, or which manufacture finished goods for local
consumption or for export.

Throughout the countries there are small industries, such
as candle factories, tobacco and match plants, breweries, dis-
tilleries and glass works, shoe and textile manufactories,
paper and cement mills and, as the local industries have
grown in number, hat and electric lamp factories, auto-
motive tire factories and automotive assembly plants. In
some of the countries, like Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico
and Cuba, other industries are being set up, like enameled-
ware factories, steel fabricating plants, here and there a steel

136 Greater America

plant, and so on through the slow procession of industrial
development which is continuing as these pages are written
and will go on expanding for years to come.

All of this definitely means but one thing, the approach
of that economic autonomy which has been mentioned so
many times as the goal of much thinking and not a little
idle dreaming, in Latin American countries. And the
growing, with that, of a higher standard of living and
higher purchasing power.

The depression of 1931 probably leaves Latin America
more advanced and on a sounder economic basis than be-
fore it came. This is certainly true in the matter of in-
dustrial development and broader opportunities for work
and advancement in the social and economic scale for the
citizens of these countries. While the world outside stood
still or slipped back, Latin America, forced by circumstances
to conserve the wealth it had or by poverty or difficult ex-
change situations unable to buy generously abroad, turned
to new, small industries. In the creation of this new out-
let for national energy and this new multiplication of the
power of human hands through the use of machinery, it
certainly has advanced its nations and its peoples. For the
machinery and the habits of thought for this type of de-
velopment come in even in the depression, and increasingly
as times ease in the recovery.

It was estimated that, prior to 1930, Argentina imported
more than 40 per cent of the products, excepting food,
which it consumed. This made for its tremendous foreign
trade, because to buy those products an immense quantity
of its production had to be exported. This was salubrious,
in the view of the old-time exporter, but it was economically
unsound, and the development of local industries, with

The Unfolding of Economic Power 137

growing wages and therefore higher purchasing power was,
and is, the soundest promise of greatly increased imports.
Industrial development, even in competing lines, is not a
deterrent to trade; Canada is the largest single customer of
the United States.

It has been said many times and in many ways that the
Latin American, particularly the tropical Latin American
of the lower classes in the social and economic scale, can-
not be induced to work for more than he needs to live.
The answer to this appearance was given effectively some
years ago in the oil fields of Tampico, Mexico. There, dur-
ing the boom period, labor was scarce and as the demand
for hands grew higher and higher wages were paid. The
first result was that the workers, earning in a day or two
what they had formerly gotten in return for a week's labor,
merely cut down their time of work, as had been pre-
dicted. The situation did not last, however, for both the
company stores and the shops in Tampico and the oil towns
stocked quantities of new and desirable merchandise from
shoes and felt hats to silk shirts, dresses and phonographs
and with the urge to spend came the urge to work to ob-
tain the money for such spending. The question of con-
tinuous employment of the labor available moved toward
solution and with it, too, came an increase in self-respect,
comfort, standards of general living with better food and
more and better furnishings, as well as clothing and lux-
uries.

The increase of prosperity and opportunity to buy has
had a powerful role in the development of the new con-
sciousness of Mexican labor, traceable back to that old prob-
lem in the Tampico oil fields. The situation is as true in
every country in Latin America. Increased purchasing

138 Greater America

power has followed increased opportunity to work at the
new industries and the markets of the exporters of the
United States and Canada, Europe and Asia have grown,
rather than lessened, in the process. There may be fewer
bolts of cotton cloth exported, because such cloth is being
made locally, but there are more specialties sold in dry
goods as in other branches of export than the total loss due
to local manufacture of other types of goods which were
once imported.

Perhaps the most important single item in the unfold-
ment of the economic forces of Latin America has been
the advance in the commercial development of electrical
power. In this, Canada and the United States have played
a role of increasing importance. British, German and Ital-
ian companies financed or furnished the equipment for
many of the earlier, smaller plants, but with the entry of
the Canadian financial interests into Rio de Janeiro in 1912
the situation has gradually changed and in the last years of
the heavy investment period immense sums were put in
Latin American public utilities by Canadian and United
States companies. These sums have gone, first, to the pur-
chase of existing plants and their franchises and second to
the replacement of those old plants by modern equipment,
chiefly made in the United States, and by the extension of
power lines in intercommunicating systems. These' changes
have made available economical and dependable power for
both industries and farms, especially farms requiring in-
dustrial power, as in the coffee state of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

By the end of 1930, when further investment ceased
temporarily, the Canadian and United States companies
served approximately 15,000,000 of the people of Latin
America with the most modern type of power generation op-

The Unfolding of Economic Power 139

crated by companies which had consistently reduced elec-
tric rates and extended facilities. The Canadian interests
were; in Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, El Salvador and Venezuela,
the United States interests in Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Mex-
ico, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecu-
ador, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Be-
fore these companies entered the field, electricity was in
many places furnished only at night on a high fixed charge
per socket and was but little used in industry. Where they
have entered, light rates are now largely on a meter basis
at lower figures, power is available continuously and is be-
ing used increasingly in industry and in the domestic load
of heating, cooking and refrigeration, and the life of the
countries and towns affected has been transformed. An
immense quantity of electric appliances and radio receiving
sets are being shipped, and perhaps the most striking ex-
ample of the change in the life of the people is the increas-
ing use of all these tools of modern civilization and com-
fort.

The growth of the use of electrical refrigeration and the
advancing perfection of machines for the cooling and con-
ditioning of the air in houses, factories and places of as-
sembly indicates that one result of many from increased use
of electricity will be the breaking of the great curse of the
Tropics, in giving relief through refrigeration to those who
in the past have had to live through unbroken heat without
surcease or relief. Years ago, the earliest ice-making ma-
chines brought to the Tropics the first assurance of pure
and well-preserved food and of relief in cooling drinks.
How great their benefit has been no statistics could tell, but
refrigeration has made possible the development of vast
territories which once were uninhabitable to white men be-
cause of evil food more than any other single thing. The

i4 Greater America

coming of home ice-making and refrigeration units has
been another great step, now being adopted everywhere
throughout Latin America. Air conditioning and cooling is
now moving forward. Its effect both on comfort and on
the mental attitude of the peoples whom it will rescue
from continuous heat will be reflected in every activity of
tropical life and the results will be felt throughout the
countries which have contact with those lands. It is one of
the great gifts of electricity, and of outstanding importance
in the list of the contributions of modern industry. In a
quarter of a century it may conceivably have altered com-
pletely the life of the Tropics.

Almost all of the mainland countries of Latin America
are blessed with beautiful waterfalls, heights where water
can be impounded and all the facilities for great hydro-
electric developments. To a large extent, it has been in the
hydro-electric field that the chief power developments in
Latin America have so far been made. There are immense
waterfalls still to be harnessed, like Iguazzu Falls at the
point where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet, and
throughout the countries there are many other mighty cata-
racts that promise abundant and economical water power.
Many of these falls are far away from the markets for their
power, and Iguazzu, for instance, mightier than Niagara in
the volume of water passed, will not be harnessed for many
a long year. It is a thousand miles from Buenos Aires and
even further from its other possible markets, so that trans-
mission lines of costly design would have to be built, to
mention nothing of the technical difficulties of electrical
transmission for such distances. Therefore when the first
of the immense new power developments for Buenos Aires
was designed by the Spanish company now serving a large

The Unfolding of Economic Power 141

part of the electrical needs in that city, a steam plant op-
erated with pulverized coal was built on the edge of the
harbor, and coal imported from England and the United
States furnishes the fuel for its operation. In fact, the ad-
vance in the efficiency of coal combustion has in recent
years held back the development of hydro-electric power
wherever the question of transmission enters seriously.

Although the difficulties are many and the growth of
their markets slow, the building of electric power plants in
Latin America is advancing, like communications, a little
ahead of the need. This^eneans much for the countries,
and increasing assurance, too, for the future of the securi-
ties of the investors. In developed sections like most of
those served in Brazil, immense projects are going on for
the creation of new sources of power. Engineering works
of stupendous size have been under way in the crowded
territory around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In the
North around Bahia and throughout the interior of the
State of Sao Paulo the building of new plants and new
links of power lines have gone on apace. In Chile, where
power from the melting snows of the Andes is close at
hand, a large steam plant has been laid out and put under
construction at Valparaiso, to use Chilean coal as the source
of its power. This is a most interesting commentary on the
conflict between hydro and steam generation and also an
indication of the driving force of the United States company
which is pushing both its production and its markets for
power there.

Second only to communications, this question of power
looms. Petroleum is, as has been noted, found in many
sections of Latin America and it is used at home both for
the propulsion of vehicles and for the generation of power
for industries and for domestic use. Everywhere the

I4 2 Greater A merica

sources and facilities available are being developed and
everywhere, equally, the foundations for future industrial
expansion and human comfort are being laid thereby.
There is no question as to the availability of power, and
the ultimate developments of the waterfall resources, of
petroleum and, where it exists, of coal, waits only on the
need and the foreseeing of the need by the great utilities
companies of Saxon America which have already contrib-
uted so much to this line of progress.

The actual wealth of Latin America today is subject to a
hundred varying estimates, for the tremendous fluctuations
in the prices of commodities have inflated and deflated the
values of the lands where those commodities are produced
a dozen times in the past quarter-century, and will do so
many times again in the coming twenty-five years. More-
over, individual income statistics are of little value and lim-
ited accuracy. Per capita purchasing power is a trifle more
accurate but here, as in all the other gauges that might be
used, it is not the past but potentialities of the future that
must guide us. It is difficult, in a study such as this, de-
liberately to avoid the ancient and time-honored statistical
yardsticks, but a glance at some of those available will per-
haps explain why they must be overlooked. They will be
found in much detail in the various reference books listed
in the bibliography. For instance:

The estimated per capita purchasing power of some Latin
American countries varies (taking the United States at $100
as a base) as follows: $30 in Argentina, $17 in Cuba, $16 in
Uruguay; $11 in Mexico; $9 in Panama; $9 in Venezuela;
$8 in Brazil (a figure always misleading because Brazil's
population is far more than half unproductive and non-
purchasing): $6 in Peru (subject to faults similar to the

The Unfolding of Economic Power 143

Brazilian figures); $5 in Colombia (certainly too low by
comparison); $4 in Guatemala; $4 in Haiti.

So we turn again to the realization that, as stated many
times before, the future cannot be judged by the past. As
yet the sensing of the growth and the signs of thrusts for-
ward here and there, in highways or power development or
changing industries, are the truest indicators of the future.
All we know is that these lands have been waiting for four
centuries, and that the depression of 1930 revealed them as
only beginning to touch their possibilities, and as less ad-
vanced toward those possibilities than we, or they, had real-
ized. Behind' the scenes mighty forces are at work. It has
seemed fair and just, for their sake and for our own real-
ization, to seek to evaluate those forces here. The slow
awakening of the past century and the pause of the depres-
sion period have but given direction for advancement, have
but given occasion for the shaking off of old economic fal-
lacies and the girding of these vigorous new countries for
the meeting and the solving of the problems of tomorrow.
Their economic power has unfolded and is still in the proc-
ess of unfolding. It represents one of the constructive forces
of the world's future. As such it is a symbol of all that we
can see and hope for in the development of a Greater Amer-
ica that shall be richer in its contributions to civilization and
in its returns from the civilization it serves.

Chapter VII
MUSCLES, MACHINES AND THE JUNGLE

THE ancient nations of Latin America were all with the
exception of the Inca, where llamas were available built
virtually with the bare hands and muscles of men and
women. There were no sources of power, not even beasts
of burden, other than the llama, in all the length of
the Americas. The Spanish conquest was achieved virtually
afoot; Cortes had sixteen horses in his army that conquered
Mexico, Pizarro twenty-seven in Peru, and Alvarado's
army tramped the jungle from Mexico to Guatemala with
only a few horses for the leaders, but none for the service of
supply. The opening of the deep interior, the planting of
the far missions of the friars and Jesuits in every corner of
the colonial world, was done in large part without animals
although horses, asses, mules and pack-bullocks gave in-
creasing aid in exploration and development as years and
centuries went on. Only today, with the airplane, are men
opening wildernesses which until the late twenties of this
century could be penetrated only by expeditions in which
each man, white, black or brown, had to carry his own food
as well as his arms. So on down to our own day did the
limitations of human physical strength and endurance bind
the development of Latin America with its appalling ob-
stacles.

The cramping force of the dependence on hand labor
extends far beyond transportation problems, however, in ex-
plaining the formerly slow development of Latin America
and especially of tropical Latin America. The labor re-
quired in all agriculture before the development of machin-

144

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 145

ery was enormous. In the Tropics, and particularly in the
great plantation crops to which its agriculture has been ded-
icated, this is multiplied many-fold. The classic example is
the subtropical crop of coffee, whose yield per acre is more
or less comparable to that of wheat but which requires ap-
proximately ten times the labor, with hand cultivation,
weeding, pruning and finally in the tremendous hand task
of the harvest.

Under a theory that Latin America is a region of abun-
dant as well as cheap labor, this demand for redoubled
hands would not be a serious question, but Latin America is
not, and never has been, a region of abundant labor sup-
plies. Cheap, yes, but not abundant.

Contrary to general opinion an opinion that has been
wrong] for about four centuries there is no great surplus
of labor in any part of Latin America. The Spaniards were
the first offenders in this assumption, and their reckless
abuse of the supposedly illimitable supply of Indian work-
ers quickly decimated their numbers. The Portuguese, in
their turn, drove whole tribes of Brazil's Indians into the
trackless interior of the Amazon, where the Indian popu-
lation today is estimated at over 10,000,000, living in a state
of virtually complete savagery. African slaves were im-
ported, probably to the number of between two and three
millions, to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Today in
some countries, like Brazil, they form the bulk of the lower
classes, pure blood or mixed with the Indians and the Port-
uguese. The Indians who survived in the Spanish colonies
after the bitter centuries of the repwtimientos and encomi-
endas, under which they were enslaved to the mines and
plantations, have spent most of their mental and physical
energy in devising ways of escaping, so far as opportunity
allowed them, from the necessity of labor at the white man's
tasks.

i4 6 Greater A menca

Economic pressure brought many of the Indian and mixed
blood populations under the yoke of production in the
mines and plantations of today, but the long and authentic
history of peonage in many of the countries of Latin Amer-
ica should be indication enough that there is no plethora of
labor there. Wage slavery has been the rule at one time or
another in every country producing great plantation crops
in Latin America for the past two centuries. It persists
widely even today, a direct inheritance from the actual slav-
ery of the Spanish and Portuguese era. Time and a chang-
ing social attitude on the part of governments and employ-
ers have modified the conditions somewhat, but men still
work under the shadow of debts deliberately forced upon
them in order to obtain their labor, and from which they
never escape so long as they live.

This is the situation in most of the countries where there
is no floating population of independent workers, and even
where these exist the custom of kidnaping workers from the
cities and more salubrious climates for work on dank tropi-
cal plantations still goes on. Mexico, in the last years of the
Diaz regime, was the scene of the best-known of these cases
of modern slavery. The sisal plantations of Yucatan were
supplied with labor from far-off Sonora, in the persons of
Yaqui Indians caught as rebels and condemned for penance
to be transported hundreds of miles and to virtual slavery
on the hemp farms. In the Valle Nacional, the tobacco dis-
trict of Vera Cruz, and, more disgracefully, on some of the
cultivated rubber plantations owned by stockholders in the
United States, enganchados (literally "hooked" laborers)
were taken in droves, kept in barbed wire barracks and
worked mercilessly. The basis of their service was a debt,
advanced for a debauch and kept active by purchases at the
plantation stores, and not uncommonly this debt was passed

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 147

on from father to son. The abolition of this debt system, so
far as it has been accomplished, was a worthy achievement
of the Mexican revolution of 1911-21.

The debt peonage system persists elsewhere, however, and
variations are still effective. In certain Central American
coffee plantations labor is held in this way. Under another
plan here, whole villages in the hills are bound to serve in
the coffee-picking on distant plantations by pledges made in
return for the use of farmlands, near the villages, which the
plantation owner acquires for the purpose of thus guar-
anteeing his labor supply.

In many of the countries producing seasonal crops, as in
Cuba during the sugar cutting season and in Argentina dur-
ing the wheat harvest, there has been a steadily increasing
movement of labor from Spain and Italy, carried in large
ships especially fitted for the traffic and coming and going
from the fields of their own and of the American countries
where they work. They are facetiously called "swallows,"
a word coined to describe their seasonal migratory habits.
This movement was interrupted during the depression of
1931, but it is an essential factor in the economic life of the
two important agricultural countries just mentioned, Cuba
with its plantation crop of sugar, and Argentina where this
migratory labor is essential in normal periods for the han-
dling of its great modern crops of wheat and linseed and to a
growing extent its cotton and sugar in the subtropical sec-
tions in the North.

The shortage of labor is thus not confined to the Tropics
alone; it is universal in Latin America in prosperous times.
In other countries there is some migration of labor, both
from Europe and between one another. In the lands which
do not have sources of migratory labor, as in the coffee
countries generally, the workers vitally necessary for the

148 Greater America

picking season are brought from the cities and towns to the
plantations. Coffee harvest time is a period not unlike the
freedom of the harvest festivals of earlier days in Europe.
Not always are living conditions such as to invite all the
hilarity, but there is much of the joyous laxity of ancient
times.

In the economic unfoldment of Latin America, the
scrapping of the old tradition of plentiful labor is thus in-
evitable. It is a tradition which, as remarked, is as old as
the Spanish Conquest, but it has been sustained down to the
present 1 by the low wages paid to workmen. But this wage
condition has not been due to a plethora of labor or any
uncomplicated operation of the old law of supply and de-
mand. It has persisted because the production of raw ma-
terials, to which Latin America has been chained so long,
could not be carried on except with cheap labor. It was low
wages or no work at all! A man working in the cane fields
or picking coffee could not possibly produce enough to
bring back to him from the distant world markets more
than a starvation wage. The very heart of the backward-
ness of Latin America is here revealed, and with it the
promise of future change throughout its economic status by
crop diversification and the developing use of machinery
both in agriculture and industry.

When sugar fell to so low a price that no wages could be
paid for its harvesting, the field laborers of Cuba cut it
for nothing, and this cane which theoretically cost nothing
to harvest went to the mills to be ground, largely with the
powe.r of, its own stalks burning under the boilers. It
poured into world markets, further to depress the price of
sugar, and the meager return sufficed only to keep the soup
kitchens going on the plantations. There was no other

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 149

work, so the laborers cut cane, and their pay was a bowl of
soup for work that, even with sugar at normal prices, was
worth little enough for them and their families to live on.

The wages of Latin America's millions have been de-
termined by the value of their product, not by the scarcity
of the hands. It is for this reason that the use of machin-
ery in Latin America has been so astonishingly effective.
By all the rules of economics taking the premise that
labor was cheap because it was plentiful Latin America
was not ready for the use of machinery. It was the same
condition, the casual observer thought, as in the Orient,
where ships were coaled by hand in baskets because the ex-
cess of labor made this method cheaper than doing it by
machinery. But this was not the case in Latin America.
The moment machinery was introduced in any industry,
production increased and higher wages could be paid, and
were paid. The reason for machines was that there were
not enough hands to do the work, and the reason for low
wages was that the work, done by hand, competed with the
starvation wages of Asia and Africa for similar production,
or with machinery elsewhere.

In the field of the production of raw materials, Latin
America has indeed in recent years begun to feel keenly the
competition of Asia and Africa. The cacao of Africa has
already taken the place of South America's production of
the chocolate bean in the lower grades, and even lower-
grade coffee may well pass to Africa in the future. Rubber
has been grown in Asia for years and more recently in
Africa, and the tendency toward the transfer of the planta-
tion crops in general from Latin America to these areas of
abundant as well as cheap labor is probably inevitable.

The lack of an actual surplus of labor thus enters defi-

150 Greater America

nitely into the fate that decrees that Latin America shall
some day cease to be a great source of plantation produce.
Another factor is that the newer plantations in Asia and
Africa are being organized on a more soundly modern and
thus more profitable basis than the old methods which have
prevailed in Latin America through the slow growth of the
industries there. A new organization anywhere can insti-
tute changes in industries which are wrecked against the
inertia of tradition in the lands where they were first estab-
lished.

The transfer of the rubber industry from Brazil to the
East Indies is a case in point. Wild rubber trees dot the
forests of the Amazon, but as with all trees in the tropical
forests the stands are not uniform and the rubber trees are
scattered, from a dozen to a hundred per acre, over im-
mense areas. The rubber latex, or sap, was tapped by
wandering Indians or by loosely controlled gangs, often of
impressed workers brought from all over Brazil. It was
cured by dipping a stick in the white latex, drying it over
open, smoky fires, and layer by layer building up roughly
circular bales about the size of a bushel basket. This rub-
ber, dirty, filled with sticks and leaves and often enough
smoked and burned so as not to be workable, was the
world's only source of rubber at the beginning of the era
of the automobile.

Plantations were projected and some were laid out, in
Brazil and in Mexico as well, but there was neither the
labor nor the organization to perfect them to the extent
which was finally achieved early in this century in the East
Indies and the Malay peninsula. There, with seeds smug-
gled out of Brazil through a shai;p cordon of inspection, im-
mense areas of rubber plantations, with the trees in long
rows and carefully tended, were laid out and grew into

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 15*

production. Modern methods of curing the latex were de-
vised and perfected and plantation rubber from the East
Indies is today the dominating grade in the world markets.
The Brazilian industry has virtually disappeared. Recent
attempts, as of the Ford interests, to create a plantation rub-
ber industry in Brazil have been delayed as much by the
lack of the large sources of labor required and by the inertia
against the necessary large-scale organization, as by politi-
cal conditions.

It is interesting to note here that in the early years of the
present century Mexico was the scene of an extensive de-
velopment of rubber plantations, into which many millions
of dollars of North American savings were poured. Those
plantations failed for three reasons, one the fact that they
had been planted to the native Mexican rubber tree, castillao
eldstica, instead of the Brazilian hevea which the market
demanded, another was the coming of the Mexican revolu-
tions about the time when harvests should have been best,
and the third was the lack of labor. Debt peonage, shang-
haiing and kidnaping, as noted above, were resorted to in
many sections to secure workers, under conditions that
could not last, and did not. The wreck of that industry was
definite and final. It was typical of all the new plantation
industries which have sought establishment in Latin Amer-
ica. Labor was cheap, but it was not plentiful, and both
were vital to the success of the rubber plantation venture.

As we can see now, in looking back, this effort to force
a new plantation crop on Mexico in a time when labor
vitally needed for that crop was conspicuously lacking was
an economic falsehood, despite its long and distinguished
precedents. A most interesting contrast enters here. At the
very time the rubber trees were being planted by the mil-
lions in the new Mexican tropical plantations (that is, the

i5 2 Greater A merica

early years of this century) a modernly organized company
was establishing another rubber industry, in the northern
deserts of Mexico. Here the wild guayule shrub had been
found to contain rubber, and in the generation which has
followed men have perfected its planting, cultivation, har-
vesting, grinding and extraction. Everything was done by
machinery, from tractors in the fields to the retorts of the
chemical plant which finished it. The guayule industry was
a joke in the old rubber plantation days, yet because it was
founded on modern methods and the use of machinery in-
stead of labor that did not exist, it has survived while the
effort to perpetuate the plantation system of rubber trees in
Mexico dismally failed.

A correlated effect of the continuing labor shortage in the
tropical countries of the Americas has been the lack of de-
velopment of organized planting and cropping and there-
fore of sure supplies of products other than their long estab-
lished staples like sugar, coffee and cacao. Cocoanuts and
other tropical sources of vegetable oils are, for instance, not
raised generally in Latin America on a production basis and
fibres, gums and other products of tropical forests are not
available in the quantities and with the assured supply that
they are in lands which have surplus laborers to turn to
their production, as China can suddenly turn thousands to
the production of, say, mah-jong sets or other articles of
momentary popularity. There come continuously to im-
porters in the United States samples of raw products used
extensively in industry and which the sender of the samples,
in Latin America, promises can be furnished in any quan-
tities. The buyer of such products, who must be assured of
a, continuing supply, almost invariably has found on investi-
gation that the source is from wild trees and when the un-

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 153

touched accumulations of years should have been used, only
a limited new supply was assured. Plantation development,
as of copra and of course rubber, is a vital necessity to the
production of most of the crops of the Tropics today. The
automobile industry as we know it would be literally im-
possible if it had only the limited number of the wild trees
and the limited labor and industrial organization of the
forests of Brazil to depend upon for rubber.

There are but two solutions if Latin America wants to de-
velop the possibilities of tropical raw materials. One is the
use of machinery, and the concentration on crops where
machinery can be used, and the other is a new labor supply.
Of the two, there seems no question as to the ultimate and
wisest choice. Machinery offers to Latin America release
and prosperity in this as in other fields.

Latin America has, none the less, heretofore preoccupied
itself with ideas of finding a cheap labor supply, if not at
home then from across the seas. The direction of its agricul-
tural development has apparently been determined by the
answer given here, although not without something of a
struggle. The importation of, or the mere opening of the
doors to, labor from the Orient might conceivably make
possible the perpetuation of the plantation system. It might
continue the production in these lands of their present raw ,
material crops, and expand their activities in yet other
branches of raw agricultural materials production where
cheap labor is a necessity. But as a rule the Latin Americans
have instinctively resisted going the whole way toward this
solution; the plantation system has not been so deeply in-
grained in their economic consciousness as that.

In some regions, however, there has been a definite trial
of Oriental labor. In the British island of Trinidad there

154 Greater A merica

is a large Hindu population, well established and probably
rooted to the soil in the few years of its existence. Some
Hindu labor has gone into Guatemala and to Panama.
There are Japanese agriculturists in larger numbers than
is realized in northern Brazil and even, in colonies, in the
subtropical and temperate regions. There are some 60,000
Chinese and Japanese in Peru and probably as many in
Mexico, and it may be difficult to turn back the flow in the
future. Where Oriental labor abounds, generally speaking
there will be plantation crops and a definite effort to hold
back the trend toward more diversified and more scientific
agriculture in the future.

In the development of agriculture in Latin America, there
has been a trend toward the control of raw materials in-
dustries through monopolies or near-monopolies of the prod-
ucts. As the East Indian rubber producers tried, and failed,
to control the production and price of rubber, so in Latin
America similar monopolies, as in Chilean nitrate, Mexican
sisal hemp and Brazilian coffee, have been attempted and
have been wrecked in the inexorable operation of economic
law. The Chilean nitrate monopoly fell before the competi-
tion of synthetic nitrates whose development was forced on
Germany during the Great war by the blockade and the
vital need of nitrogen for gunpowder and fertilizers. The
Mexican sisal monopoly fell before the competition of other
hemp-growing regions stimulated by the artificially high
sisal prices forced by the Mexicans themselves. The sub-
stitution of the combine wheat harvester for the reaper was
both an effect and a cause in the sisal situation. In the
operation of the latter, sisal hemp was vitally important for
binding the sheaves of wheat, a need which has been dis-
appearing with the growing use of the combine. It is prob-

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 155

able that the high prices demanded by Mexico from its
monopoly had something to do with the hastening of the
general adoption of the combine, as Chile's high prices for
nitrate had in the case of its competition from synthetic
nitrates' after the war. Brazil's coffee "corner" was wrecked
on the fact that it did not control the output and that its
boosting of prices encouraged the growing of more and
more of higher grades of coffee than Brazil's own in the
"mild" coffee countries of Colombia, Central America and
Venezuela. The tin production of Bolivia, by contrast,
flourished on the monopoly prices instituted by the tin pro-
ducers of the Straits Settlements, although Bolivia's industry
fell, with that of the East, when the balloon burst.

It is estimated that there are between twenty and thirty
great commodities in which monopolies might be attempted,
but the bitter experience of the recent past can perhaps be
counted upon to discourage the effort or, perhaps better said,
will bring more rapid retribution. It hardly seems likely
that the monopolies that were responsible in large part for
the development of some, at least, of the raw materials crops
of Latin American agricultural enterprise will work to en-
courage the extension of those crops, or of others like them.
The sugar control plan which began operation in 1931 had
as one of its major tenets the restriction of new planting,
and of foreign marketings as well, and the surplus stocks
of sugar were held as a threat of local dumping against any
of the countries that might violate the agreement. This will
apparently be the trend in any future efforts to maintain
prices in world commodities. Nothing in the horizon as
this is written indicates any encouragement for a renewed
development of plantation crops in Latin America.

Diversification of crops is becoming the tendency, defin-

156 Greater America

itely, in the agricultural economy of Latin America. In
Cuba, the large sugar plantations needed every available
worker for the big crop in the days of high-priced sugar.
It was cheaper, or seemed cheaper, to import foods from
abroad, even from the United States, than to raise them
locally. More than that, the transportation facilities of the
island were taxed to their capacity in handling cane and
sugar, and food raised at one end of the island could not be
carried to the other. Even Havana, a large city, and there-
fore an excellent market for produce, could not get even the
native fruits like pineapples from Cuban provinces during
rush times on the railways; Hawaiian canned pineapples
were served on Cuban tables. Eggs and flour, canned goods
and patent foods of every sort were imported, until the fall
in Cuban sugar prices became a dominating factor and the
people, encouraged by the government and with heavy new
duties, took up the raising of their own foods. The change
covered the whole island and perhaps saved, as much as so
individual a movement could, the economic existence of the
people and prepared them for a sounder prosperity.

A similar movement spread through all of the countries
during the 1931 depression. Mexico, which since the revolu-
tion of 1911 had been importing increasing quantities of
foodstuffs, began to raise more foods, and more kinds of
foods. This was in part due to the dying down of the
agrarian agitation, during the height of which the confisca-
tion of producing farms to be turned into communal lands
for the settlement of revolutionary promises made it perilous
to raise more food than was actually consumed by the farmer
himself. It was due, also, to an increasing grasp of the
necessity of home production. The opening of new high-
ways into the interior of the country, thus bringing into
contact with the cities new regions of food production, also

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 157

had an important effect by making possible the transport to
market of crops which formerly had to be consumed at home
or wasted.

These are but examples, but everywhere the tendency has
been marked. It is of interest here because it indicates a new
type of thinking regarding agriculture, a turn away from
the "cash crop" to the food crop. It means, as everywhere
in the world, a greater conservation of wealth and a greater
opportunity to build the individual and the nation into
sound and balanced economic units.

This leads, however, to the most significant phase of the
future possibilities of Latin American agriculture. In the
past, as we have seen, and carrying on into the present the
agriculture of Latin America has been harnessed to the
production of world commodities with which to pay for in-
creasing imports. This has resulted in the creation of a
plantation economy, marked by peonage, low wages and a
stagnation of development in the living standards of the
people. It has been suggested in these pages that the end
of these plantation crops has come in Latin America and
that a new era is dawning.

That new era is apparently going to take very definite
directions and certainly it does not eliminate the cash crop,
nor the possibility of an increasingly important income from
agricultural products abroad. But it does mean the bringing
of the Latin American into the machine age of production
in agriculture and definitely into the production, on a large
scale, of the great food staples of the world. In this Argen-
tina, a temperate zone country, has led the way and with its
wheat, maize and oats and with its growing meat packing
industry, has taken a lead which will be followed by others
and which will grow in importance and not decrease.

158 Greater America

The reason for this is that the older nations, including the
United States and to a lesser extent Canada, are becoming
industrialized so rapidly that first in meat and wool and
later on in the cereals, it will have to turn more and more
to Latin America for its supplies. The overstock of food-
stuffs of the depression years was not symptomatic, for its
net result was to arouse the threat that hovers over all high-
cost countries, of a continuation of lower prices and unpro-
ductive cropping in the future. The indication is of the same
procession of events as happened in Europe when the United
States in the second half of the last century began to pour
cheap farm produce like wheat and maize, pork products
and other staple produce into the older countries. Europe
could not produce as cheaply as it could buy these foods,
and so turned its energies to the manufacturing of goods to
be exchanged both with the United States and in distant
lands for these foodstuffs or for the money with which to
buy them.

In the case of the United States in those critical years so
like those which Latin America faces now agriculture, and
above all the agriculture of food production, furnished an
immense wealth to send abroad to pay debts and for the
purchase of foreign goods. Wheat exports more than
trebled even during the Civil War in the United States, and
had increased twelve times by the end of the next forty
years. The influence of that flow of agricultural produce
on the economy of Europe, and on the foreign trade expan-
sion of the world then and ever since, has been compared
justly to the importance of the flow of gold and silver to
Europe from the Spanish Americas during the three cen-
turies of colonial rule.

The role of supplier of the food of the world is definitely
passing from the United States. In cereals it is Canada and

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 159

Argentina which are now on the upswing, but there are vast
future food-producing areas in Latin America even outside
Argentina. That country is already the one great wheat
region of Latin America, although as yet a comparatively
restricted producer in a world sense, that is, from the view-
point of the world's consumption of and need for wheat.
In the twenty-five years of the future with which this book
concerns itself, that transformation of Latin America into
the producer of the world's foods will be well on its way.
What will be produced time only can tell, but tendencies
are everywhere evident. First of all, perhaps, will be meats.
The introduction of the quick-freezing process which makes
frozen meat as palatable as chilled meat has definitely
presaged the coming, first of Argentine and Uruguayan
meat to the market of the United States, and later of beef
from the warmer countries. There, in the vast fields where
flourish rich grasses that cannot be raised in regions where
there are hard winters, cattle are being fattened economically
and well today and will be shipped in the future, when the
need becomes definite in Europe, in the United States and
in Canada. It was a wise economist who, speaking for Latin
America in the midst of the tariff agitation of 1929, declared
that with or without tariffs or embargoes the countries of
Latin America looked confidently to the opening, in ten
years, of a vast demand for meats and meat products from
their countries by those of the North.

The lack of development of the food crops in the Tropics
has been due to two definite factors. One is the climate itself,
with its alternating dry and rainy seasons and the luxuriance
of the jungle growth that takes back, each wet season, the
gains of the dry. The other is the problem of soils. Maize
is the one cereal crop that grows successfully throughout

160 Greater A merica

the Tropics without skilled cultivation. Wheat is produced
in the uplands, and under somewhat difficult conditions.
Other grains have their vogue with the growers in different
countries, but there has been almost no real study, excepting
on the island of Porto Rico, a possession of the United
States, of the agricultural possibilites of the Tropics. The
studies there are still continuing, but they indicate above all
that technical and engineering study, and the adoption of
the knowledge gained, are the means that will solve the
problems of tropical agriculture in the Americas. There
seem to be no inherent reasons for expecting anything less
than great achievements.

The climate of the countries of Latin America is primarily
blamed for the fact that food crops fail and that weeds
flourish under present types of agriculture in the humid
hot country. The disgruntled amateur farmer whose ex-
periments with a vegetable garden in the Tropics inspired
him to remark in the end that "nothing grew but the fence-
posts'* blamed his difficulties on insects, soil, rain and theft.
His experience is not, however, solely tropical; there was
the humorous Kansas father who accounted for the failure
of his fruit trees to yield enough even for home canning to
"the three B's the Bugs, the Birds and the Boys."

None the less, however, the climate of tropical Latin
America has had much to do both with its emphasis on
plantation crops adapted to its soil and climate (if not to
its labor supply) and with its delayed evolution into diver-
sified agriculture. Although it is to be remembered that
modern agricultural science, modern agricultural machinery
and irrigation and drainage engineering with effective equip-
ment have already found many of the answers to its difficul-
ties and are on the trail of others.

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 161

In addition to the various geological phases of the environ-
ment of the Latin American countries, which have been
noted earlier in this chapter, there are distinct climatic
zones which, although more extensively discussed in the ex-
cellent economic geographies listed in the bibliography, may
well be repeated briefly here. In all the countries, from
Mexico southward and until the south temperate zone is en-
tered in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, the area is divided,
in common parlance, into three zones.

First is the tierra cdiente or hot country, lying along the
seacoast and up the side of the mountains to about 2,500
feet altitude, where the climate is hot to torrid (the mean
is 76 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and the seasons are the
rainy and the dry. While there is a distinct variation both
in the time of year and the length of the rainy season in the
various tropical countries, it generally is well under way by
May and continues to October or November.

The tierra temflada or temperate zone lies, in the tropics,
at between 2,500 and 6,500 feet altitude, where the mean
temperatures range from 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Here
the seasons ard still dominated by the unvarying pendulum
of the rainy and dry periods of the hot country, although
the nights are cooler than the days. In fact, the chief diffi-
culty of the climates here and still more in the cold zone, is
that there is more variation between' night and day than be-
tween the coldest and warmest seasons of the year. In this
zone are the fertile eastern slopes of the great mountain
ranges, and many of the wide savannahs of the higher hills
where crops of the north temperate zone grow well.

The tierra fria or cold zone is that lying above 6,500 feet
altitude; the mean temperature here is from 50 to 65 de-
gress Fahrenheit in the inhabited regions. The City of
Mexico, the City of Guatemala, Bogota, Quito and La Paz,

162 Greater America

amongst the capitals, are in this region. Here, still, the sea-
sons are the rainy and the dry, but the influence of the sun's
annual voyage to the north and to the south is felt in the
climate of the altitudes more than in the lowlands and on
the slopes, and the rainy season more nearly approaches
the climatic winter.

There are of course other factors than these conventional
zones which influence the climate and the agriculture in-
deed of Latin America. There are, for example, certain im-
portant desert zones, like those in northern Mexico corre-
sponding to the deserts of Western United States, and the
desert Pacific coast of South America below Ecuador.

Buty as suggested, studies of all the conditions of tropical
agriculture are continuing and amongst other things they
are discovering that, in the coining readjustments and ad-
vances in tropical agriculture, it is not alone the seasons and
the rains that cause the difficulties, but the soils as well.

Basically, the tropical soils are rich in humus, but de-
ficient in mineral salts, those ingredients in the soil of the
temperate zones which have made them the granaries of the
world. But mineral salts are replaceable by fertilizers, and
by the same means there can undoubtedly come an elimi-
nation of some at least of the tropical luxuriance of weeds
which naturally grow strongly in the soils to which they
have been inured for centuries. The problem has not yet
been solved, but it is in process of deep study and the end is
sure, for science and engineering are, indeed, always the
friends of these lands.

Irrigation, the product of engineering, is the solution of
the problem of rainy seasons and dry. Years ago it was de-
termined in the sugar fields of Hawaii, and of Peru as well,
that under very different conditions irrigated sugar fields

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 163

are more economical and better producers than the lowlands
on which sugar cane is traditionally grown. Modern irriga-
tion, allowing the flooding of fields of sugar and rice, or
what you will, and then the drainage of those fields for the
ripening and then drying for the harvest, is certainly one
solution, at any rate, of the consuming costs of handling
cane and grain in soggy fields.

The development of irrigation is one of the great ro-
mances of Latin American agriculture. Based primarily on
the need for water from the streams during the dry seasons
or (as in Peru) to give any moisture at all to desert fields,
the knowledge of the uses of water for farming on dry land
has for thousands of years been almost instinctive in the
Indian farmers, from Mexico to Patagonia. Where water
could be gotten from flowing streams or where, as primitive
engineering advanced, it could be brought from afar, there
was prosperity and plenty. The terror of the system of
milpa farming which depended on burning the standing
stalks and weeds to get a clearing was the sod which in a few
seasons grew hard and firm and in the end killed the seeds as
they were planted. That terror, even, disappeared before
irrigation, and the crude tools of stone that could not break
the sod still served the primitive farmer well in his irrigated
fields. So, down to modern times, wherever engineering
has been able to impound water in arid regions or where the
seasons are sharply defined and the dry period long, in those
places has come prosperity through bountiful, sure crops.
As a corollary has come, more recently, cheap hydro-electric
power from the same irrigation dams, to aid in the farming
and even to pump water from beneath the surface of lands
too far distant to be served by the irrigation ditches of the
dam itself. Irrigation has transformed flat regions, emi-
nently adapted to the use of machinery, from deserts into

164 Greater A merica

gardens and the process is hardly begun. Irrigation
and fertilization are the answer to most of the questions
that are presented as the unanswerables in regard to tropical
and desert agriculture.

Immense regions still await the solution which other
branches of science and engineering and machinery can pro-
vide for them. The Amazon valley, occupying nearly half
the area of South America, is yet to be harnessed. Its first
use will unquestionably be its forests, now almost com-
pletely neglected and yet capable of producing an immense
amount of timber for untold centuries to come. Under
sound forestry laws and methods, which have been evolved
at such tragic cost to the wasted timber resources of the
United States and now of Canada, the forests of tropical
Latin America may well last in perpetuity. The definite
principles of the application of modern forestry to the con-
glomerate forests of the Tropics were laid deep in the stud-
ies made in the Philippines in the earliest years of the
United States occupation there, and are being advanced
by further experiments today. The forests of the Amazon
can well furnish timber and pulp and paper to the world in
centuries to come. But beyond these resources, the future of
the Amazon waits on stupendous engineering develop-
ments. The Amazon and its hundred mighty tributaries,
and likewise the upper reaches of the corresponding river
system to the south, that of the Parana and the Paraguay
(the River Plate basin), are so flat that drainage is slow
and difficult. They present engineering problems and rec-
lamation costs which may not be solved for generations.
That they can be solved when the need arises need not be
questioned, but there are the immeasurable areas on the
very slopes of the Andes that drain into the great basin

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 165

which are to be developed first, and will be before the need
comes for the basin itself.

The contribution of the two Saxon areas of Greater
America to the solution of the agricultural problems of
Latin America are very definite. Canada, and the North-
west of the United States, form the laboratory of the tem-
perate region, and the once desert wastes of western United
States, the laboratory of the Tropics, Irrigation as we have
seen has been proven beyond question to be of immense im-
portance in the development of all hot regions, and in the
triumphs of dry farming in certain semi-arid sections, the
future trend of the lesser crops may be foreseen. The tropi-
cal studies of the experts of the United States government
bureaus have been designed primarily for the benefit of the
farms of the United States, and much good has been done in
their application, but beyond that has been the contribution
to the solutions of the problems of the Latin American
countries, from Tropics to south temperate zone. Their in-
vestigations have given material for broad education and,
translated into Spanish and Portuguese by the governments
of the various countries themselves, have begun the changes
to self-supporting agriculture which are the backbone of any
movement toward "economic self-sufficiency." Translated
into terms of world development and world trade, this
means a higher standard of living and greater buying
power.

Most of all, however, in the list of exchanges of support in
agricultural advance between the nations of America, has
been the gift of machinery. In the somewhat circum-
scribed field of agriculture, this contribution has been tre-
mendous. The combine harvester, mentioned above, was
evolved in the United States but its first great use was in the

166 Greater America

wheat fields of Argentina where its labor saving elements
were of prime importance, and where the immense level
areas which make up the wheat growing region of Argen-
tina furnished the ideal field for the use of the best and
most advanced of farming machinery.

The tractor, as applied to agriculture, not to mention
its other uses has revolutionized farming in the temper-
ate and sub-tropical regions and certainly in the Tropics,
No list of the contributions of North American manufac-
turing to the uplift of Latin America is complete without
a figurative wreath of laurel on the machine which can go
where no vehicle but an oxcart could ever go before and,
indeed, with crawler tractors, into swamps and over moun-
tains where no ox could pull a load.

In the opening of the new lands, in the Tropics or in the
temperate zone or on the heights, North American earth-
moving machinery has made possible developments which
without its help would literally be waiting still for a mir-
acle. Through swamps and over trackless wastes, the power
shovel and the bulldozer and the scraper and grader have
not only built roads, but the very fields themselves.

The list is endless, and not least are North American
plows, of all the varied types which long experience has
evolved here. A disc plow drawn by a pair of oxen, or a
handmade wooden plow drawn by a gasoline tractor
these pictures you can see in almost any day's ride in Latin
America today. They mark the growth, the reaching, for
the perfection of a mechanized age in agriculture. They
point the way to the complete emancipation of the farmer
from his backbreaking toil of centuries. As yet little defi-
nitely designed machinery has been evolved to meet peculiar
conditions in Latin America, but that is on the way even for
the savannahs of the high Andes, limited in extent and thus

Muscles, Machines and the Jungle 167

subject only to the work of human muscle or of specially
designed machinery.

The gifts of the machine age to Latin American agri-
culture are on their way today. For a generation they have
been going in in increasing measure and during recent years
they have been supplemented, too, by all the panoply of the
machinery of farm and shop and mill fed by electricity from
plants designed and built, large or small, in the countries
to the north. Flour mills and packing plants, establish-
ments for the extracting of the essence of farm produce to
be sent to the factories of the world in concentrated form,
canning plants for the preservation of fruits and vegetables,
grading and sorting and oiling and packing-plants for fruits
tKese are rare today, but they are as certain for the
future of Latin America as is the rising of another sun.

As the years go on we shall see, too, a closer grading and
more careful picking over of the raw materials sent out to
world markets. Wool will be selected and baled more
carefully in its marketable classifications, cacao beans picked
over, or selected by machinery, so as to command the high-
est prices in world markets; coffee, too, and indeed every
product of every country. The co-operative brands which
have placed certain types of oranges, melons and canned
goods of the United States in a position to command, every-
where, full value of their marked grades without the ex-
amination of appraisers, will find their parallels in Latin
America. In those countries, today and for generations
past, it has seemed to simple minds best to mix good and
bad in the hope of getting a price higher than the average,
or at least better than would come if the culls were thrown
away. This has put a tremendous tax on their product and
deprived them of many of the markets which have waited
for them. The lesson has been learned already in many

168 Greater America

fields and it is one of the signs of an assured future in all
production and trade there.

At the risk of repeating, it is impossible not to close this
chapter on the note of the conquering of the jungle itself
by the machines. Today, in tropical swamps, power shovels
and draglines and crawler tractors blaze the trail of the
modern pioneer. Bridges and drainage and irrigation
ditches are their meat, and in a day they devour mud and
muck and stagnant water in proportions that meant
months of slow and killing effort of armies of men with
shovels and baskets, only a few short years ago. No longer
does a tropical railway mean that a human life must be
paid for every tie laid down, as was the estimate in the orig-
inal building of the Panama Railroad. No longer does
spoiling food and the unending dank heat of the tropical
forest hang as a continuous menace over the white men, and
over the black and brown men, who blaze the trails of civil-
ization. Even the Indians of Guatemala, who refused for
years to work in the lowlands because legend coming down
from distant ages told of the death that lay in wait there,
these Indians are now coming, gingerly, down to the work
and the comforts of banana plantations in the very places
from which plague or famine once sent their ancestors
scurrying to the hills. New vistas of life and comfort open,
and the simple life of the past is revealed, by contrast, in all
its crass discomfort and peril to human health and welfare.

All these factors are firm realities, the facts of the new
world in which the men of the Tropics and of the south
temperate zone live, with ourselves. Nowhere in the whole
world are those facts, of the beneficence of modern prog-
ress, more laden with promise.

Chapter VIII
FOREIGN GOLD AND LOCAL BUSINESS

THE UNITED STATES has invested about $63000,000,000 in Latin
America, about four-fifths of it since the close of the Great
War. Great Britain has invested an almost equal sum,
rather more than four-fifths of it prior to 1914. The United
States investment has been primarily in the period of de-
velopment, the earlier British belongs to the era of con-
cessions and exploitation. The British loans to govern-
ments were most of them at high rates, in a period of ignor-
ance and uncertainty of security, and the British private in-
vestments were most of them staked down with concessions
and monopolies, as in railways and port works.

The investments in Latin America from the United States
and from Canada have been roughly divided, half and half,
between government securities and private enterprises. All
of them were, however, considered as sound business risks,
and neither as politics nor charity. The earlier investments
from the United States (prior to 1923) went into mining
ventures and plantation and fruit companies in which the
returns were high and which yet on the basis of stock
market valuations quickly found a level approximately
equal to the rate that would have been expected from simi-
lar ventures in the United States itself. As a general rule
the United States investor, particularly in the bond-selling
boom between 1923 and 1929, has given those securities the
benefit of the highest rating in their class, a generosity
which the disastrous drops in many of them in 1931 did not
seem to justify.

Slowly, and despite many difficulties, however, the eco-

169

170 Greater America

nomic structure of Latin American finance has been built
up. Not all the bricks that went into it were sound, but as
time has gone on, those have been replaced. In the 1923-29
orgy of investment in Latin American securities here, many
of the identical scenes and problems that had paced the
boards in London half a century before were re-enacted,
almost letter by letter; only the better organization of the
investment market of the world prevented a repetition of
the scandals that accompanied many of the British flota-
tions. The result was in part to be foreseen, even at the
height of the recent boom, but only in part. As a matter of
fact, with the exception of perhaps only Bolivia, none of the
borrowings in the boom period were unjustified by the in-
comes of those years, and most of the countries, despite de-
faults and postponements, are basically sound and their se-
curities will regain and retain a definite and increasing
value. As this is written, these words alone can be said in
encouragement for the investors in $3,500,000,000 of gov-
ernment loans. The whole purpose of this book is, how-
ever, to show how deep-rooted are the fountains of strength
in Latin America, in its relations to the Greater America of
which it is destined to become so integral a part in the
future. On those foundations confidence can be built with
security,

The fundamental basis of investment in Latin America
was laid down in 1927 at the Third Pan-American Com-
mercial Conference in Washington by Herbert Hoover,
then Secretary of Commerce of the United States. He re-
peated these words at the Fourth Conference in 1931. In
1927, this analysis was accompanied by the promise that
future loans to Latin America from the United States should
be upon that basis. The investment orgy that followed a

Foreign Gold and Local Business 171

few years later did not respect this dictum, but it remains
the soundest basis, and the most friendly, for all future
lending:

No nation, as a government, should borrow, and no government
lend, and nations should discourage their citizens from borrowing
and lending, unless this money is to be devoted to productive enter-
prise. Out of the wealth and higher standards of living created from
enterprise itself must come the ability to repay the capital, together
with the net gain to the borrowing country. Any other course of
action creates obligations impossible of repayment except by a direct
subtraction from the standard of living of the borrowing country
and the impoverishment of her people. In fact, if this principle could
be accepted between the nations of the world, that is, if nations would
do away with the lending of money for the balancing of budgets, for
purposes of military equipment or war purposes, or even that type of
public works which do not bring some direct or indirect productive
return, a great number of blessings would follow to the entire world.
There could be no question as to ability to repay. With this increas-
ing security, capital would become steadily cheaper, the dangers to
national and individual independence in attempts of the lender to
collect his defaulted debts would be avoided, there would be definite
increase in the standard of living and comfort and prosperity of the
borrower, There could be no greater step taken in the prevention of
war itself.

Here, then, is the basic principle of sound finance and in
its tenets, albeit they have not been followed with great ac-
curacy in the recent past, are both the security of the lender
and the prosperity of the borrower. Looking into a future
of Latin American financing for financing they will
have, in the development that lies inevitably before them
it is safe to say that new and very definite standards will be
set, both by borrowers and lenders, and that these standards
will be carefully scrutinized and supervised.

In the past there has been a certain sort of supervision,
whose actual functions have, however, been somewhat mis-
understood. This has been the study by the United States

172 Greater America

Department of State of foreign loans, but this has not been
with any view to determining their value as investments or
even as commitments for the governments concerned It
has been, on the contrary, for the sole purpose of deter-
mining whether these loans, either in the form in which
they are drawn up, in their terms of payment or collection,
or in the identity of the borrowing country, might possibly
become, in the future, the source of any international diffi-
culty in which the United States government might pos-
sibly be involved. It was the sort of scrutiny that the for-
eign office of a government might be expected to make, and
nothing else. It did not remotely approach the sort of scru-
tiny and supervision that will be necessary, from some such
body as an unhampered and unofficial association of bond-
holders, before the government bond market in the United
States recovers from its shocks of 1931.

Indeed, it is not likely that further investments in Latin
America will for a long time be in government loans as
such, that is loans issued on the sole credit of a government
and for purposes of balancing budgets or armaments, or any
unspecified ends. The advice of President Hoover will be
fairly sure of belated acceptance, in the next few years.
There is, however, the typical productive loan, to govern-
ments, which he discussed. This would be for public works
which, like well-planned highways, promise an early and
continuous return in taxes on automobiles and gasoline, or
which like irrigation dams, port works, schools and certain
other public buildings and sanitation plants, add to wealth
and progress. They should continue and increase. It may
be that, in the first revival of foreign lending, loans will be
carefully earmarked for such service and supervised by for-
eign engineers; this would be a not unnatural reaction from
the mistakes of the past.

Foreign Gold and Local Business 173

The great bulk of the new loans of the future will prob-
ably, however, be to industries, through investment trusts,
through great development corporations, or direct. The
industrial financing of the past in Latin America has been
through companies controlled in the country from which
the money came. These will continue, but in addition to
them will certainly enter, in the future, investments in the
industries of Latin America itself, much as industries in the
United States have for a century received the investments
of stockholders abroad, and returned sound profits thereon.

Such at least is the ideal. Investments in Latin America
will continue, for two very definite reasons. One is that,
with lowering money rates and lowering returns on invest-
ments in the United States and Europe, the foreign bond
or the share in foreign business must have its place in every
portfolio of investments, to raise its average return. Also
with greater security and wider knowledge than in the past,
the doubts of the depression period will be effectually and
safely removed, beginning, of course, in specific and well-
understood cases. The second reason is the reason for this
book, the realization that Latin America is definitely the
field where our money as well as our energies and our ma-
chines must serve in the building of an incubator of new
wealth and new markets for the saving and the upbuilding
of civilization.

The financial history of Latin America, in relation to the
outside world, goes back only to 1822, when Greater Co-
lombia and Chile floated government loans in London.
The Colombian loan is typical of what happened then, and
for many long years thereafter. The risk was great, for the
governments were new and repudiation was the expected
rule in case of counter-revolution. The Colombian loan of

174 Greater America

1822 was for 2,000,000, issued at 84 and drawing 6 per
cent, but with commissions and the deduction of two years'
interest in advance, Colombia received only about ^1,500,-
ooo. In the subsequent splitting up of Greater Colombia
into Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, this debt was par-
celled out and was lost in the maze of defaults, refundings
and arrangements. In the list of the subsequent debts of
Colombia is one, for ,200,000, secured by the total revenues
of the lucrative salt monopoly, on which interest of 15 per
cent per year was promised, and paid. The history of the
Colombian loans is typical, and yet in the end the losses to
the investors were not heavy, and since 1922, when the first
Blair loan was floated in New York, the record has been
excellent.

The matter of importance is not, certainly, the difficulties
of the past, but the fact that these countries have risen above
them. But for the fall in commodity prices and an uncer-
tainly founded national economic system, there would be
today no worry in any informed quarter as to the sound-
ness of the bulk of Latin American government invest-
ments. And perhaps most interesting of all is that the fi-
nancial record of Chile, whose first bond issue was made in
1822 at about the same time as Colombia's was so good that
not one page of the Annual Report of the Council of the
Corporation of Foreign Bondholders of London is devoted
to it, until 1932! This report is the factual record of all de-
faulted and repudiated government obligations, and is in-
dispensable to the understanding of the complicated finan-
cial history of Latin America. Absence from its pages is the
hall mark of probity and honor.

The most notorious of all the Latin American bond flota-
tions of the early period was the series of issues brought out
in London and Paris between 1867 and 1870, for the con-

Foreign Gold and Local Business *75

struction of an interoceanic railway in Honduras. The first
was for ,1,000,000, issued at 80 and bearing 10 per cent,
The second, issued in Paris, was for ,2,490,108 at 75, bear-
ing 6 2/3 per cent interest and repayable in seventeen years.
The third, for ,2,500,000, was issued ostensibly at 80 and
bearing 10 per cent interest and 3 per cent sinking fund.
From these loans, Honduras received sixty miles of railway
and ; 2,000 in cash. All of the rest was used up in com-
missions to Honduran agents and English and French brok-
ers. The loan was defaulted until 1926 when the interest,
then amounting to some ,25,000,000, and all of the ,5,-
398,570 principal excepting ,1,200,000 was dropped, the
,1,200,000 debt was accepted by Honduras and payment
arranged out of a special stamp tax on customs invoices, over
a period of sixty years. No one knows how much the
British buyers paid for these bonds, but the last issue was
certainly hocked about London at about 20, instead of the
alleged 80 selling price. The whole affair was the subject
of a lengthy and rather unlovely parliamentary investiga-
tion.

The first era of Latin American financing ended in a
burst of such scandals, through all of which the Latin
American countries were given to feel that they were both
pariahs and victims of the sharpest sort of dealings in the
money markets of the world. Their bitterness, brought
to memory clearly enough in the years in which they have
paid on debts out of which their countries got little or
nothing, has had much to do with the poor credit risks
that they have become with the passing generations. Many
Latin American governments of those days were party, too,
to the saddling of the countries with these debts, apparently
feeling, with logic, that their time was short and others
would have to pay.

176 Greater America

There was little or no industrial development, even in the
plantation crops and mining, through the first period,
which economists agree to end with 1880, with the begin-
ning of the era of railway construction and investments in
mines and plantations. In the first period, closing in 1880,
mining was primitive and undeveloped. Peru was the only
great exporter, of guano for fertilizers. Brazil had begun
the production of coffee 'about 1850, but was not yet an im-
portant exporter.

The period from 1880 to 1914 was the era of the chief
British investments in Latin America. Primarily this was
in railways, but secondarily their money went into port
works, in which the French were also interested, both ob-
taining ruinous and long term concessions in return for
what was done. The third type of British investment was
in industrial enterprises, chiefly in the extractive industries.
Early United States investments, in mines chiefly, went in
in this period. The confused history of Mexican financing,
first in the railways that were built in this period, begins
here and ends with the revolution of 1911 and the ill-fated
Madero loan which was repudiated by Carranza and led in
part to the later difficulties with all the debts, the confisca-
tion of the railways and the long difficulties of resumption
of payments on the bonds of both. It is difficult to realize,
now, that Mexico under Diaz had a world credit standing
high enough to obtain a refunding of its total national debt
on a 4 per cent basis.

The present era of Latin American financing begins with
the close of the Great War, although even earlier there had
begun the application of modern methods and soundly fi-
nanced enterprises to the extractive industries, mining, oil,

Foreign Gold and Local Business 177

bananas and sugar. Immense capital went into these from
the United States, in companies owned and controlled here.
In this period (although it began in Mexico in 1906) be-
longs the heavy investments from Canada and the United
States in electric power developments. To this era belong
also the investments in government bonds between 1923
and 1929, for it was in, these years that $3,500,000,000 of the
$6,000,000,000 of United States investments in Latin Amer-
ica went in. By 1930, after which investments dried up in
the great depression, United States investments in Latin
America had increased 339 per cent over the figure in 1913,
and 11,312 per cent over that of 1880.

It has been pointed out by authorities who defend the loan
policy of the United States investment bankers in the twen-
ties of this century that United States trade with Latin
America has increased in almost exact proportion to the
increase in lendings to Latin America in that period. This
has meant, in part at any rate, that the proceeds of those
loans have brought an increasing economic advance in the
countries which have received deserved credits. The most
caustic critic of the financial policy of the boom years will
admit that the social advance and the improvement of liv-
ing conditions and industrial activity in Latin America are
little short of startling, for no region of the world has
marked such an advance in the last fifteen years as have the
countries and the peoples of Latin America. It is not the
least of the achievement of perhaps even the orgy of govern-
ment spending that followed some of the loans to Latin
America, that increased work and the higher wages result-
ing virtually broke forever the system of peonage that
gripped the laboring classes of many of the countries.

This displacement of labor, changing its habits and its
standards of wage values, has caused difficulties and some

178 Greater America

losses to local and to foreign companies operating in those
countries, food and local commodity prices have risen, and
a whole train of economic difficulties is traced easily to the
excesses of foreign loans. Colombia's losses of labor from
the coffee fields to the public works authorized and com-
menced under the new loans of 1923 to 1929 unquestionably
caused a slowing up, if only temporarily, in the chief in-
dustry of the country. This was a direct result of the lack
of abundant labor noted in a preceding chapter, although
certainly that is no extenuation of a situation that allowed
the borrowing of money for so many public works at once
that their execution took workers who were needed in in-
dustry to produce the revenue to pay the very service on
the bonds. But nevertheless in the train of these evils came
also a rising standard of living, greater demands for the
good things of life, a broadening civilization. Education
has been extended, in part at least, as a result of foreign
loans. And no step in educational advance can be back-
ward in Latin America.

This is poor comfort however, to investors whose savings
or surplus may be tied up in Latin American bonds. The
defaults and postponements have not, however, been re-
pudiations, and indeed repudiations are not the rule in Latin
American finance. The Honduran railway loans in London
offered reason enough for repudiation, if that were the habit
or if international conditions made it possible, but in the
end perhaps all that was ever paid for the bonds, certainly
more than that ever reached the shores of Honduras, is be-
ing repaid. Had the terms been less onerous and the treat-
ment fairer from the beginning, the recent settlement could
probably have been obtained a generation ago. The present
bonds of Latin American countries, with certain exceptions,

Foreign Gold and Local Business 179

will probably be paid out, although perhaps with reduced
interest and over longer periods. The readjustment of
values and of the return on capital is an automatic one,
however, and the countries with better credit stand out in a
sharp contrast that carries its own lessons as to the value of
money and of risks.

The bond issues of the past decade have been generous
ones, perhaps too generous, but the agreed principal was
all transferred to the borrowing governments and by them
used, or wasted. The commissions were sometimes large,
and there was often a fairly wide "spread" between the price
paid by the ultimate buyer and the price received by the
governments, but it was always a matter of strict arrange-
ment and agreement. There was nothing at all comparable
to the unfairness and criminal cheating of Latin American
governments, by their own people and by the bond houses,
which marked the British loans of the first era of Latin
American investment.

There is no question, however, that the making of the
loans of the recent boom period of investment was more
on the basis of what could be sold to the avid public of
the United States than of what should properly be taken
by the Latin American governments. The sudden stoppage
of all loans was more unfair and far more destructive to all
values than the forcing of money that was not yet needed
for the national development on countries which felt, not
unnaturally, that they should take these loans while the
taking was good.

The Latin American attitude at the close of the invest-
ment orgy, and even after its reaction had tightened their
belts in private as well as public business, was less caustic
than might have seemed justified. A not unexpected result

180 Greater America

was a demand for the reduction of interest rates and the ex-
tension of the period of amortization, or the suspension,
temporarily, of payments on the principal. The admitted
credit risk had originally necessitated higher interest rates
than, for instance, on the government bonds of the United
States or Great Britain. Yet the countries which, while
others were adopting moratoriums, continued to pay in-
terest and sinking fund even with great hardship, felt that
because of that firm attitude they were entitled to interest
rates equal to those of the strongest countries in the world.
But they asked it on the ground that unless 1 this concession
were made, they would have to suspend payments tem-
porarily and that is not the ground on which such credit
terms are extended. Many difficulties came to the surface
in those hectic days, perhaps the one that made the deepest
impression on the man on the sidelines being the problem
of the relatively short terms for which the loans of Latin
American governments run. It seems just, at least in the
present stage of their development, that periods up to fifty
and in some cases to a hundred years might be considered
as the proper period for the amortization of their productive
government loans.

It is certainly far from an idle dream that foreign invest-
ments from the United States in the future will have a direc-
tion and a continuity which they have lacked in the past.
Not least of the causes of the collapse of Latin American
securities which set in in 1930 was the fact that many of the
projects for which money had been lent in the preceding few
years were unfinished, and as yet unproductive, and when
the sudden closing off of the flow of money came, these
projects could not be completed and brought to a paying
basis. The blowing hot and cold in foreign investments and
particularly in those to Latin America is essentially destruc-

Foreign Gold and Local Business 181

tive both to the borrower and to the security of the lender.
A more mature and ordered viewpoint of foreign invest-
ments is an inevitable outcome of the factors which are
building up a wiser organization of our foreign lending and
credit structure.

In the field of business, some prediction has been ventured
as to the type of investment of the future. Another phase
of business finance is growing in importance, and that is
the extension of longer commercial credits, a recognition of
the business position of Latin American merchants and of
what the Latin American countries have a right to expect
from the other countries of America. In the past, trade has
been built on quality, value, novelty, fast delivery, practic-
ability and easy repairs and maintenance in the case of ma-
chinery, and better salesmanship throughout. Credits have
been secondary. That time passed with the coming of the
depression of 1931. The future is to be a time of sound
business practice, carefully and soundly supervised develop-
ment in Latin America's industries, government works and
business and exchange. The Latin Americans expect, and
have a right to expect, recognition of their advancement
in business, from those who sell to them, and particularly
from Saxon America, Canada and the United States. This
recognition properly involves the issue of credits, and here
there is room for vast improvement in the United States.

Until the drop in trade in 1931, the question of credits
in export trade had not entered greatly, for the commerce
of the United States has been built, as just noted, on other
factors. That year found the credit structure of the United
States (limited to go day discounts on self-liquidating com-
mercial paper in the Federal Reserve Banking system) ade-
quate for domestic business but not geared to the needs of

182 Greater A merica

the foreign field. United States capital, borrowed by
Europe on credits artificially prepared for consumption
here, was used to finance Europe's long-term credits to Latin
America and other export markets, and in tight times the
European, chiefly the German, manufacturer was thus able
to carry off the honors and the trade. One of the vitally
important changes recognized by business as necessary to
the foreign trade structure of the United States with rela-
tion to Latin America is in banking facilities, which must
grow intelligently with growing commerce. Under the
Federal Reserve laws, intermediate and long-term foreign
trade banks can properly be formed to take a part of the
burden of foreign trade credits off the shoulders of the
manufacturer. It has been one of the fairly clear roads out
of trade difficulties, to extend lengthened credits to sound
credit risks in times of slow sales or poor exchange situ-
ations. And in times of good business, too, in the foreign
field where, even in ordinary years, it is often a matter of
close to twelve months before goods can reach the ultimate
consumer and the actual funds from him return to the
manufacturer. The credit problem is not alone one of
governments but of business and of current business, in
Latin America. It is a matter for growing confidence when
credits other than those of governments rank high in the
estimation of the shippers of goods to any foreign field.
The entry of the credit of reputable Latin American mer-
chants into the world's credit pool is sound business.

The world is indeed moving into some such new era of
business investments and credit for Latin America.
Such a change is a vital part of the links between foreign
gold and local business. The past has seen the era of ex-
ploitation, then the period of development of railways and

Foreign Gold and Local Business 183

the extractive and plantation industries, and more recently
the period of expansion and development of national
"plant" that covered the twenties of the present century.
A fourth era has opened as a direct result of the awakening
and the concentration of Latin Americans on their difficult
home economic problems in the depression of 1931. The
sudden end of the flood of easy loans brought them face to
face with their true problem, the development of a place
in the industrial world of the future, a place which both
for their sake and ours is called here Greater America.
That means, to them, a larger self-realization in business
rather more than in politics, a broader development of their
own industrial structure, a rapidly rising standard of liv-
ing, and a radical change in the type of their contributions
to the grist of world commerce.

Those changes are indicated, and are upon us all today.
They must be financed, but because they are in existence
now and must naturally be carried to productivity and be-
cause they are business and thus on a saner ground and
more philosophical basis than politics, they will conceivably
be considered on a different basis than other types of credit,
in the fourth era of Latin American investment. More care
and study, more sympathy and, in their execution, a more
helpful and efficient supervision, will be given to them
than to government loan proposals from the same countries.
Foreign gold, fused with local business, will be a more vital
element, and a safer one than in the past, in the growth
and power of Latin America.

Chapter IX
TARIFFS AND TRADE

THE earliest form of taxation in Latin American countries
was the tariff, and through all the history of these countries,
indirect taxation, rather than direct assessment of revenues,
has been the rule. The export tax flourishes, but foreign
trade being the vital factor that it is in the national econ-
omy, no export tax endures long if it is found to put the
local production at a disadvantage abroad. The absence of
taxes on real estate as such, irrespective of its productivity,
long held back the development of agriculture and the
setting up of the middle-class farmer. The income tax was
adopted in Latin America only slowly, and with consid-
erable trepidation and favoritism, in many countries.
But above all, the tariff on imports was designed to furnish,
and today furnishes, the bulk of government revenue.

In recent years, however, there have been growing up two
other phases of the tariff, in Latin America. One has been
the idea of a bargaining tariff arrangement, looking toward
reciprocity and the swapping of favors with other nations;
this has been a tendency and has been tried, indeed, through
many years. The other and more modern phase of Latin
American tariff legislation has been protectionist, the reach-
ing, through the use of tariffs on imported goods, toward
the stimulation of home industries.

Now tariffs for revenue are basically different in form
and in effect from those of a protectionist nature, such as are
assessed in the United States and Canada. A duty assessed
against a foreign product by a country where a similar

product is manufactured locally results, if the tariff is high

184

Tariffs and Trade 185

enough, in shutting out the foreign competition. Where
there is no local manufacture of a competing product, the
tariff for revenue results only in the local buyer paying more
for the imported article and the government obtaining a
revenue by indirect taxation. In times of economic diffi-
culties like those of 1931, the increase of customs duties
may result in the limiting of imports because of the in-
creased cost, and the consequent unforeseen reduction in
government revenue; the increase in tariff rates may also
be used deliberately to discourage imports with the idea
that this will help the balance of international payments,
a plan resorted to by some countries during the depression.

Theoretically, high duties restrict the use of foreign goods
but in the countries of Latin America, where high prices
are the rule and imported goods are therefore expected to
cost much more than local products, this is not a serious de-
terrent in good times; the chief influence affecting the
volume of imports is the internal economic situation, not
the price. In addition to this, under the usual form of as-
sessment of customs duties (by weight, or grade), the dif-
ference between a product expensive to start with, in the
United States say, and a similar product cheaply made in
Germany for instance, is, by the time it reaches the Latin
American merchant, nothing like so great as when the
two articles set sail for the Latin American market from
their home ports.

For instance, a carpenter's saw worth $3 at the factory in
the United States, and paying $2 duty and $i freight and
handling, costs $6 by the time it reaches Latin America. A
German saw worth $i to start with, and paying the same
freight, as it would, and the same duty, as would also be
likely, is laid down at $4 total cost. The saw from the

i86 Greater America

United States is therefore not three times as costly, as it
was at the factory, but only 50 per cent more costly. This
is not theory, but actual practice in hundreds of items of
import into Latin America. It explains in very large de-
gree the preference for the higher type goods from North
America, in competition with Europe. It also has had much
to do with the gradually closer relationship between the
countries of Latin America and the United States and Can-
ada in business matters. The maker of a fine piece of ma-
chinery that, thanks to the Latin American tariff, comes to
the buyer there as an outstanding value as compared with
a piece of German machinery which where it was built
was perhaps sold at half the price of the North American
product that maker of machines in Anglo Saxon America
has created a sound basis for appreciative friendship from
the Latin American.

Thus, from many viewpoints on the American side of the
water, the Latin American tariff system has its advantages.
But there are many disadvantages and many abuses, al-
though any tariff, when the seller and indeed the importing
house faces it, is a rather difficult and distasteful instrument.
In Latin America, tariff legislation has from the first pro-
vided two methods of assessment, by gross or by net weight,
and by percentage on valuation. The weight system has
disadvantages, but where it is not complicated by what may
be called customhouse traditions, it has the great virtue of
enabling the shipper or importer to estimate with some ac-
curacy the duty that will have to be paid. The system of
assessing duties on an ad valorem basis in Latin American
countries has been complicated by the methods adopted for
assessing those values at arbitrarily fixed figures.

The classic example of the latter is the old Argentine
tariff on watches, which collected 5 per cent ad valorem

Tariffs and Trade 187

but had a fixed value that was placed on all watches in cer-
tain groups. Chronometer or other fine movements, in
gold cases, paid 5 per cent on a fixed value of 80 pesos, no
matter what the real value of the movement, and if in a
silver case, the same movement paid duty on a 12 peso
valuation. An "ordinary" movement was valued at 30 pesos
in a gold case, 5 pesos in gold filled, 4 in silver and 2 in
"common metals." Women's watches were worth 15 pesos
in gold cases, and 25 pesos if the cases were ornamented
with diamonds or pearls, and in gold-filled, silver and com-
mon metal cases, paid the same as men's. Silk, whether in
bolts, dresses or furniture, everywhere in Latin America
pays high duties, and the assessing is done in a wholesale
manner. In Mexico, years ago, a certain set of silk up-
holstered furniture reached the owner with the upholster-
ing slashed, to learn if it was silk, and the whole piece had
been put on the scales and duty as silk assessed against wood
and all by that total weight.

In more recent years, assessment by actual value has been
sought and in this the value at the factory has often been
taken. In most countries of Latin America, the specifica-
tions and prices of different makes and models of motor
cars as they appear in El Autom6vil Americano, a commer-
cial journal published in the United States, are taken as the
basis of assessment for duties. In Argentina, until very re-
cently, motor trucks were allowed to enter on a special
classification as tractors and therefore as machinery (al-
ways assessed for low duties), provided they could pull a
certain load under certain conditions; the annual field day
in which the trucks proved their mettle in competition
with the crawler tractors was always an event in the auto-
motive world, and it meant a great difference in duties on
future shipments.

i88 Greater America

Many customs duties in Latin America, even today, are
based on differences in quality described in, the law itself as
"fine/ 3 "standard," "ordinary," and "common," which,
needless to say, leaves an appalling gamut of choice to the
customs assessor. Similarly, the use of the phrase "Amer-
ican type," or "French type" or "Austrian type" and applied
to furniture and other things, has caused continuing con-
fusion, but perhaps no more than the difficulties and fines
arising out of the determination of values of textiles by
the number of threads to the square centimeter. Foreign
manufacturers whose looms do not conform exactly to the
probably ancient types in vogue when the tariff law was
passed may generously send a slightly finer grade, in num-
ber of threads per centimeter, with the result that their
customers are assessed heavy fines for false declarations.

All these are difficulties inherent in any tariff system,
and particularly where the framers are politicians and even
more so where, as in Latin America, the tariffs are usually
drawn up from the viewpoint of the retailer, merely be-
cause there are few local manufacturers. The difficulties
in getting skilled and informed assessors is not without its
part in the problem also, for skilled assessors are the prod-
uct of industry and not of schools or the retail stores, and
Latin America has not, as yet, the industries in which to
train such men. Complications there are, in the tariff as-
sessment practice of Latin American countries, but as the
years have passed these have been gradually ironed out and
the problems of today are rather with the system and with
the wild things which are sought to be accomplished from
it, than with the actual enforcement at the ports. It would
also be just to remember that the mere cost of administering
the tariff law in the United States' is alone greater than the
total tariff revenue of any Latin American country. And

Tariffs and Trade 189

there are those who have criticisms of the United States
assessments of classifications, values and duties.

The thought o reciprocity treaties has long been para-
mount in the tariff and international relations of most Latin
American countries. The idea of granting special tariff
privileges to a manufacturing country in return for special
tariff concessions on the commodities and foodstuffs and
other products of the Latin American country always seems
at first thought, an excellent way of assuring markets
abroad. The United States now has one such arrangement,
and only one. This is with Cuba, where a 10 to 20 per
cent differential in favor of the other country is granted on
all duties reciprocally. The United States twenty years ago
had a somewhat similar arrangement with Brazil, but
Brazil's chief export to the United States is coffee, which
was on the American free list anyway, and the scheming
and political wire-pulling by United States exporters and
still more by Brazilian importers, at both Rio de Janeiro
and Washington, which marked the closing weeks of each
year when items were selected for reduced duties, made the
arrangement so cumbersome that it was abandoned volun-
tarily by the United States.

In the strained economic atmosphere of 1931, Cuba con-
sidered seriously the abrogation of its) reciprocal agreement,
on the ground that the new sugar duty in the United States
worked in favor of its rivals within the United States tariff
borders, anyway. It was held that the 20 per cent differ-
ential meant nothing of actual value in the sugar trade as
Cuba's chief competitors in the United States market were
Louisiana, the beet sugar interests of the West and North-
west, the Philippines and Hawaii. Cuba began to feel, in
other words, that it was giving more than it got. That is an

190 Greater America

inherent difficulty with reciprocity arrangements, but it is
not the final answer by any means, nor has it deterred the
Latin American countries from going forward in their
search for such arrangements.

The United States has obtained a few Latin American
signatures to its standard form of commercial treaty by
which, excepting only the arrangements of the United
States with Cuba and with its overseas possessions, each
signatory will extend to the other equal treatment in cus-
toms matters with what is given or may be given to the
most favored nation. But outside the list of signatures
there has long been activity and Canada has, within the lim-
itations of dominion preference, entered into some reciproc-
ity arrangements. During 1931, the question was vigorously
to the fore, with France taking an active part. Both Chile
and Brazil took up the matter of reciprocity treaties very
seriously; the Brazilians had found their old treaty with
France denounced and skillful diplomatic moves, including
threatened duties on Brazilian coffee in France, were being
made in the effort to readjust the relationship. The French
"tariff of combat" has been a tempting example to Latin
American political economists, and the end of the reciproc-
ity discussion is as yet far off. The question of the sound-
ness or unsoundness of reciprocity from the purely technical
viewpoint is far from the whole of the problem.

In the early years of the formation of the Republican
protective tariff doctrine in the United States and under the
leadership of the powerful "first Pan-American," James G.
Blaine, the commodities produced exclusively or chiefly in
Latin America were to be on the free list. In the beginning
this was a not inconsiderable matter, but gradually more and
more of those items have been moved to the dutiable list,
and of the chief Latin American products only coffee, cacao,

Tariffs and Trade 19*

nitrate and petroleum remained on the free list in the Tariff
Act of 1930, and copper and petroleum were immediately
brought under pressure for transfer to the dutiable classi-
fications.

In the future, the relations of Latin America and the
United States seem destined to approach more and more
closely. The growing interest both on the part of exporters
and of those who have only the thought of a greater and
sounder America at heart seems to indicate that the reci-
procity question with regard to Latin America is far from
closed, even by the solid doors of present "most favored
nation" treaties. Tariffs in Latin America are destined to
much fluctuation in all probability, due both to the need for
revenue and the desire to protect growing industries.
Through those tariffs probably no door can be opened ex-
cepting reciprocity, so that, whatever the difficulties and
whatever the technical unsoundness of the idea, thought
must be given it.

There has been talk, at various moments in the economic
history of the Americas, of customs unions either within
Latin America itself or amongst all the nations of the
hemisphere. The latter is probably much more likely of
accomplishment than the former, although either is difficult.
The tariff walls between the countries of Latin America
are towering, and the milk of human kindness has not
prevented the imposition of duties, for instance, in Chile
against the cattle of Argentina, or in Argentina against the
superior wines of Chile, or between the nations of the At-
lantic littoral of South America over yerba mate tea. Cuba
puts a duty on coffee, to stimulate a home industry, despite
the difficulties of Brazil with that product. As yet only the
Central American countries, with their loose and limited

192 Greater America

customs union (if it can be so called) have shown any in-
dications of friendly reciprocity, although Peru and Chile,
ancient enemies but with generally non-competitive prod-
ucts, are moving toward a possible mutual tariff arrange-
ment. The United States and Canada remain the great
market for Latin America, however, and will become so
increasingly as the years go on. As the economy of both
nations changes they will buy more and more from Latin
America, not only of the commodities in which those coun-
tries have specialized in the past, but of the new food crops
and manufactures and semi-manufactures which lie before
them in their economic destiny. The Western hemisphere
will draw together more closely and in our prophetic
quarter-century many things that seem impracticable now
customs unions and reciprocity treaties and regional in-
ternational customs conferences, with real results must
in some form or another be adapted to the imperious de-
mands of the commercial co-operation of the nations of the
Americas.

The protectionist phases of Latin American tariffs have
very generally, in the past, been of the extreme hothouse
variety. The infant industries have been encouraged, usu-
ally at the behest of some powerful local interest, by duties
which frankly seek to be practically prohibitive. Often,
however, under such tariff s the price of local products, when
a single factory held the monopoly of trade, was usually
raised to so close to the cost of the imported article that they
invited competition, even at higher prices, from foreign
goods of better quality.

In the logical development of this type of hothouse tariff
protection, however, competitive local industries grew up.
Where a normal industrial growth would have seen only

Tariffs and Trade 193

the creation of different industries, in an artificial atmos-
phere the temptation of the success of one only brought
duplication, and bitter price wars which ended too often in
disaster. Before 1924, Chile's protective duty on men's hats
resulted in the establishment of one or two local factories,
which charged prices only a little below standard North
America and Italian hats imported through the high cus-
toms barrier. Five years later, the success of these plants
had brought others into the field, and one could buy an
excellent Chilean hat at a ruinously low price. The natural
adjustment, which is on the way, is not for protective du-
ties which create monopolies for a single factory and thus
induce destructive local competition but for duties which
invite the finest quality of foreign product and encourage
the gradual improvement of local standards while leaving
the cheaper markets effectively to the local manufacturer.

In the orgy of tariff increases which swept the world
from 1928 to 1932, Latin America did its share to add to the
confusion and destruction of trade, but it is important to
note that adjustments in these countries were almost as
prompt and rather more effective than elsewhere and were
for the general benefit of both the imported and local arti-
cle. The protectionist era of Latin American tariff making
is undoubtedly here in full blast, with many mistakes to be
sure, but with prompt corrective moves as well.

As has been discussed earlier, in the chapter on economic
development, these new tariffs have consistently either low-
ered, or refrained at least from raising, duties on industrial
machinery and on materials for manufacture, from raw cot-
ton which is material for a textile mill to the heavy cotton
fabric which is equally raw material for an automobile tire
factory. There has, that is, been a provision of means for
the encouragement of branch factories and assembly plants

194 Greater America

as well as for new industries of local importance and origin.
It is interesting to note here that probably one of the rea-
sons that will prevent a Latin American customs union will
be the fact that if such a union existed the branch factories
and indeed the national industries of certain countries
would forestall, for many years to come, the establishment
of similar factories in neighboring countries. For instance,
with a Latin American customs union in full operation in
southern South America, it seems likely that branch factories
in Argentina, for instance, would be looked upon as ade-
quate to supply Chile, Uruguay and Southern Brazil, pre-
venting the possible establishment of similar branch factor-
ies, which are much desired, in those other countries. It is
considerations such as these (and taking into account the
proud nationalism in industry, as in much else, which is so
vital a factor in Latin American relations) that are amongst
the most powerful factors in advancing or retarding the real-
ization of the dream of a Greater America linking all
nations of the Western Hemisphere. New industries and
branch factories create no competition of far-reaching im-
portance between Latin American countries and the United
States or Canada, but they are a dividing element in rela-
tions between the countries of Latin America themselves.
The industrial trend of Latin America is a factor drawing
Latin and Saxon America together, not separating it. Po-
litical interests may seem to force the Latin American na-
tions into a unit opposed in essence to the United States;
trade interests and industrial development draw all to-
gether.

Tariffs are not all of trade, however, and particularly not
the tariffs at one end only. The tariff policy of the United
States has been blamed, at the other end of the exchange,

Tariffs and Trade 195

for many of the problems of Latin America which arose
following the enactment of the Tariff of 1930. The world
depression, however, has so obscured the relative values of
the tariff and the slump in commodity prices that came at
almost the same time that no one can offer irrefutable evi-
dence or even entirely sound comment on the effect of the
United States tariff. Its part in encouraging a world tariff
orgy was unquestioned, but the very violence of the results
may lead to solutions which cannot be guessed as this is writ-
ten. It is of some significance to note that within a year
and a half after the enactment of the 1930 Tariff in the
United States, the one Latin American product which was
actually most severely touched by its provisions was being
deliberately increased in acreage in Latin America as a por-
tion of the plans for readjustment of the economic picture.
The reference is to linseed, the duty against which encour-
aged many wheat farmers to try its cultivation on a large
scale in the United States. The results were apparently not
so satisfactory as to justify the extension of the experi-
ment, and as men cannot make paint or successful linoleum
out of cottonseed (for whose protection the linseed tariff
was imposed) the Argentine linseed farmers have gone
back to the job.

The question of tariffs is complicated beyond the analysis
of a non-technical book, and its phases have been set down
here only in a desire to evaluate them for the future in
their relations to trade. Certainly the whole world, and
most of all the countries of the Americas, have tariffs which
leave them plenty with which to bargain. The situation in
1931 was not encouraging, excepting as it was symptomatic
of a coming change in attitude toward tariff questions. The
direction will be toward mutual arrangements of some kind,
or so it seems safe to predict. As has also been suggested

196 Greater America

earlier in this chapter, the tendency of the future of tariff
adjustments and of trade seems, even after any analysis of
tariffs, to be inevitably toward the closer knitting of Latin
America and Saxon America and looking toward the
formation with full national independence of action, of the
firm trade structure for Greater America.

Latin American commerce, and with growing emphasis
that with the United States and Canada, has been increas-
ing steadily for the entire economic history of the new na-
tions there. The United States, in the statistics of 1930, be-
came the chief source, at last, of the imports of all the
countries, and the dominating market for the exports of
most of them. In the next quarter-century, it seems more
than likely that this importance of the United States in
Latin American import and export will increase, rather than
diminish. There are very definite reasons, well grounded
in experience, for this assumption. First is the tendency,
already noted in these pages, for the United States to be-
come more and more an industrial and less and less an
agricultural country. First meats and then gradually other
great food products will have to be imported, whatever ef-
forts the tariffs of the future may make for the apparent
purpose of limiting such imports. The effect of the United
States tariff is becoming more and more only to raise prices
paid by the citizenry for the benefit of the United States pro-
ducers, rather than to shut off the importation of competi-
tive foreign goods. Food products from Latin America,
even through rising tariffs, will certainly be imported by the
United States in increasing quantities as production in this
country declines through the coming years. For instance,
in 1931, following the increased tariff on corned beef to six
cents per pound, a new brand of Argentine canned corned

Tariffs and Trade *97

beef invaded the United States market at a figure less than
this type of import had commanded before the 1930 tariff.
This was an individual drive to gain that important market,
but it is also indicative of the attitude of forward-looking
industrialists in Latin America toward their coming oppor-
tunities in the markets of North America.

Nor are the United States and Canada alone considered
as American markets by the progressive South American.
Mexico, Cuba and the northern countries of the southern
continent are invaded by salesmen for the products of Ar-
gentina, Chile, etc. All the countries will be increasingly
the object of a trade propaganda of growing skill from their
sister nations, as the years pass. The Saxon countries of
North America will, however, be the chief objects of the
selling drive, and time and the changing conditions of pro-
duction in the North are working rapidly toward that
greater use of Latin American foodstuffs and even manu-
factures. No one who has watched the importation into the
United States of fruits and vegetables and, in slowly grow-
ing quantities, of manufactured food specialties from Latin
America can doubt the commercial possibilities of the future
in these and other directions. The tariffs of the United
States, and of Canada, will not shut them out, simply be-
cause they will be needed in the coming years, despite price.

The exports of the United States and to a lesser degree
those of Canada have grown so promisingly in the past that
they, too, must be considered as sure to increase. There has
been a closer approximation to the types of goods needed
in Latin America by the various groups which sell, and
more willingness to meet those needs with new designs.
But above all, Latin America has come to a realization of
the value, to its people, of the products of large production,
cutting costs and giving prices which no local production

198 Greater America

can even approximate. It insures an advancing market for
the more advanced types of machinery and for the produce
of mass manufacture, with all their economies and all their
promise for the individual as well as for the nation.

The markets of Latin America for the advanced products
of the great manufacturing countries have been of slow
growth and, again, the future can only be charted, not cal-
culated, from the past. Those lean years under Spain and
the adaptation of even the wealthy to the products of field
and forest and of rough handicraft left the new countries of
Latin America but slender markets, as we have seen, for
a generation after the independence. Even today, probably
not over 25 per cent of the populations of the countries, on
the average, buy imported goods outside of the simplest
tools, like their long machetes or corn knives and heavy
hoes built close to the pattern of the stone axes of prehistoric
times which are made abroad for their trade. But that 25
per cent is a greater proportion, as it is of course a much
greater number, than ten years ago, just as those of ten years
ago were more than the decade preceding, and so on back
into the past, and so, too, on into the future. Tariffs and
embargoes are temporary, but the progress of man upward,
and the increase of his wants and of his capacity to procure
them, is continuous.

Chapter X
POLITICS AND PROGRESS

THE political problems of Latin America and the tre-
mendous social forces that are inherent in those political
issues are not to be understood through even the deepest
study of any single phase of their political history. The ex-
tensive literature and eloquent protagonists of every revolu-
tion presume to interpret them all, but each is but one facet
of the stone. The trends back toward Indianism which
have appeared from time to time throughout Latin Ameri-
can history are not the whole story, nor are the pronounce-
ments of the great men of the independence, even Bolivar
himself, alone sufficient. Mighty streams converged to cre-
ate the realities of Latin America in the past, and yet more
powerful and complicated forces exist there and in the
inflow from without today. The need for a realistic view
forces itself upon us everywhere in the panorama of Latin
American affairs, but nowhere with such force as in its
politics. And without an understanding of Latin American
politics every question, from anti-hookworm campaigns to
the selling of electric flatirons, wallows still in confusion.
Without such understanding, certainly, the relations be-
tween Saxon and Latin America float nebulously in abstract
idealism.

For centuries before Columbus came, Indian governments
had been functioning throughout the vast spaces o the
American Hemisphere. They were warlike, of necessity,
and they had been built through slow evolution into types

that served effectively at least as a reflection of the needs, if

199

200 Greater America

not the desires, of the people whom they ruled. But there
were only two centers of what could by any stretch of the
imagination be called civilization. One was in Mexico and
Central America, and one in Peru. Both were so rotted
with sedition and disorganization that they fell with ap-
palling ease before the Spaniards. The fabled Aztec empire
of Central Mexico, heir and lord of the traditions of the
Mayas in Southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, fell
before 673 Spaniards. The superb Inca empire of Ecuador,
Peru and Bolivia collapsed before the onslaught of Pizarro
and his 130 Spaniards. The lesser Indian kingdoms in Co-
lombia and Chile were conquered or absorbed, as were
tribes and "nations" elsewhere, by the Spanish invaders.
One alone of all the thousands of little Indian nations in the
New World, the Araucanians of Chile, were "uncon-
quered," and they from warlike prowess rather than politi-
cal or social inertia. The descendants of the Araucanians,
mixed with the virile blood of Northern Spain, are today
probably the most compactly nationalistic and Spanish
in custom and nature of all the peoples of Latin America.

The Indian nations of Latin America, generally speaking,
were theocracies, a fact which accounts in no small part for
the tremendous influence of the Church and the priests in
extending the Spanish and Portuguese rule. The transfer
from pagan gods to Christian symbols, at any rate, was easy
and the acceptance of priestly government was based on cen-
turies of custom. The Indian rulers were, in the Aztec and
Inca empires and in many others, of a different, almost an
alien stock from their miserable commoners, so that the ac-
ceptance of the new rulers and religion was not a new or
difficult adaptation.

The cult of a divine origin of the rulers and ruling castes
was emphasized by the fact that these rulers had indeed

Politics and Progress 201

come from far places in a remote or recent past, while the
humble men and women they ruled had been of the soil
from untold centuries, without tradition as to themselves,
overawed by the noble legends of their conquerors and
rulers. The Quechuas and Aymaras of the Inca empire
were probably not different from their descendants today
in Peru and Bolivia, and the Otomis of the hills about Mex-
ico City have not merely seen Aztec, Spanish and republican
rule, but have suffered, in centuries forgotten, equally for-
eign conquerors of Toltec and Chichimec strains. They
have remained little changed, perhaps, but their rulers have
imposed new customs and, step by step, even some social
advances. The tragedy of the fall before Spaniard and Port-
uguese of those Indian rulers and the systems -of life and
government which they represented was conceivably no
more a tragedy than the fall of the rulers whom they them-
selves displaced.

Sentiment is a treacherous guide in the maze of history
and is especially so when the contrast is between eras of
which we have more or less accurate knowledge and eras
of a past all but unknown to us. The Incas of Peru left no
written records on any of their great monuments, and little
in documents excepting those set down immediately after
the Conquest. The Maya monuments of Mexico and Cen-
tral America, covered with hieroglyphics, remain unread
to this day/ save for their dates. The Aztec codices, a
baker's dozen of which alone survive, tell only the glories
of kings and the boastful records of conquests. Only of the
Spanish rule in those countries have we a fairly complete
social history.

We do know that the Indian past in Latin America gave
the natives their communism (the natural form of local gov-
ernment in all primitive society), their pitiful, if pictur-

202 Greater America

csque, native crafts, and their stolid acceptance of direction
from above. But that past was, even from what has come
down to us from the early historians of the conquest, no
whit more (and probably less) sympathetic to the lowly than
was the Spanish rule. It was much less so than that of the
modern age which builds consciously on the progress and
the rising living standards of all the world. Yet whether
or not, history moves inexorably forward and in the history
of the Americas Spain, and to a less degree Portugal,
brought to the shaping of political history a social force
whose impact was tremendous and lasting.

The Spaniards and the Portuguese came to America in a
stately train. Their colonies in the New World were laid
down, like the colonies of ancient Rome, under an ordered
plan, as contrasted with the haphazard and for long years
poverty-stricken colonies of England in the North of the
hemisphere. The sovereigns of Spain owned the land and
the Indians, and sent their rulers and their colonists out
under royal authority. Within less than fifty years after the
discovery of America by Columbus, and a century before
the founding of the first royal British colony in North
America, the first Spanish viceroy had set out for Mexico,
with a retinue, salary of $30,000 a year, and generous
provisions for his bodyguard and government. By the be-
ginning of the Seventeenth Century, and before the landing
on Plymouth Rock, there were two viceroys ruling the
Americas for Spain, from Mexico and from Lima, with sal-
aries of $100,000 and $150,000 respectively, and government
establishments corresponding. The flow of gold and silver
had long since swelled to a flood, the Indians had been
made first serfs and then slaves, the colonies were prosper-
ous and their old and new royalties rich. Spain, resting on

Politics and Progress 203

her denuded hills, sent her most vigorous sons across the
seas and brought in the wealth which was to prove her own
undoing, albeit it revived and influenced the whole future
of European history and commerce.

The political power of such a government, autocratic, rep-
resented in the person of the king and of his viceroys, was
tremendous. It dominated the life and progress of the
Americas not only through the three centuries of colonial
rule, but far into the period of independence. The repre-
sentatives of the Church, marching with the soldiers, pene-
trated far intp the interior, set up missions whose ruins re-
main today clear across the northern frontier of "New
Spain" in the southern United States, from the Atlantic to
the Pacific, and, equally, in the far interior plains of Para-
guay. The caste system, a crude and destructive effort to
perpetuate dying European feudalism in the New World,
was imposed. The peninsulares, or Spaniards from Spain,
alone held office or ruled, while their native-born sons and
daughters formed a new caste of criollos or Creoles (liter-
ally the descendants, born in America, of Europeans) and
long after the end of the miscegenation of soldiers and In-
dians they were marrying native women because Spain pro-
hibited the emigration of unmarried Spanish women to the
colonies. The great mestizo or mixed-blood caste was
formed on solid and legitimate foundations in the higher
reaches of society, and Creoles and mestizos together were
prohibited from the privileges of the European Spaniards.
The generations of brooding on this discrimination had not
a little to do with the united front of mestizo and creole
which finally made possible the sacrifices and triumphs of
the revolutions of independence.

The role of the Roman Catholic Church in the political

204 Greater A merica

history of the colonies and of the republics that have suc-
ceeded them has been almost invariably wrongly estimated
by foreigners. The grants of the vast areas of those colonies
to Spain and to Portugal came, as we saw earlier in these
pages, from the Pope, and provided for the Christianization
of the Indians and the upholding of the Faith throughout
all the regions that might be conquered. Under this ar-
rangement priests and friars went forward with every army,
and when the soldiers settled down to administrative duties,
pressed beyond their furthest lines into the wilderness.
They built the missions and subdued the Indians in the
name of religion, and their contribution is written large
across every page of colonial history.

The revenues from the churches went in general, how-
ever, not to Rome but to the king in Madrid or in Lisbon,
and this provision is in large measure responsible for the
superb monuments of the churches that rise above every
city and hamlet in those portions of Latin America that
were settled during the colonial days. The priests preferred,
not unnaturally, to expend their revenues, which came
from their lands as well as from contributions, on churches
rather than sending them to the king, and the instructions
of the Popes gave strong support for this plan. Millions of
money and the work, probably with little pay, of hundreds
of thousands of Indians went into these lovely edifices,
which remain to this day to embellish the cities and the
countryside.

The Inquisition was active in the colonies during the
Eighteenth Century but although heretics were tried and
some actually burned in the colonies the chief activity, and
the most provoking to the Creoles, was the censorship
which the Holy Office assumed over all printed matter in-
troduced into the colonies. The liberal writings of the pe-

Politics and Progress 205

riod were officially excluded, but surreptitiously circulated,
and amongst the manifestations of bitterness toward the
Church which burst out during the revolutionary period
were serious attacks on the buildings of the Holy Office.

When the break from Spain came, the Church remained
loyal, excepting for a few priests who, individually, went
over to the revolution and in some cases, like the devoted
country priest, Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico, became its he-
roes. Since the revolution, the Church's influence has been
essentially conservative, and the Conservative party in all
the countries is almost always a Clerical political group.
The result has been the reiterated efforts to destroy the
power of the Church in Latin American republics. In Mex-
ico, two tremendous upheavals have sought to break that
influence and to despoil the Church of its wealth and even
of its rights of ministry, and the second upheaval has not
completed the decision even after nearly fifteen years. In
most of the countries the Jesuits have been expelled on the
ground of their political power and acumen but in some, as
Colombia for example, the power of the Church remains
unbroken.

It is not to be forgotten, in this connection, that the terms
of the grant of the colonial church revenues to the king of
Spain were such that the revolutionary governments had ap-
parent ground for holding that, as successors to the king,
they too should enjoy these revenues. The Church authori-
ties, backed by Rome, have fought this interpretation vig-
orously, and this controversy has embittered the succeeding
generations in the young republics. This cleavage of opin-
ion explains much of the Mexican difficulties, although this
essential detail of the financial bases of the revolutionary
controversy over the religious issue has largely been lost
sight of.

2o6 Greater America

The economic tutelage of the colonies was one of the
important factors in their strict control by the governments
at home. Their manufactures and those of the Indians
were suppressed and for a time even the cotton raised, as it
had been raised for centuries in Mexico, could not be woven
in factories in the colonies,but had to be shipped to Spain and
thence re-imported as finished goods. The colonials were
encouraged to produce, first the precious metals and then
raw materials, and to buy all manufactured goods from
Spain or Portugal as the case might be. In this, the eco-
nomic situation of the English colonies in the North differed
but little, and one of the causes common to both revolts
from the mother countries was the resentment at and thfe
cost of this commercial .domination. Here, however, the
parallel between the conditions in the two colonial regions
ends. The Spanish and Portuguese colonists were under
direct and unquestioned political control from the mother
country. They had but one political lesson to learn, that of
unquestioning obedience, while the English colonists in the
North had not only their own self-government for train-
ing, but the long history of democracy from the Magna
Charta down to the Mayflower Compact, and the growing
liberalism of their own era amongst the English at home.
The result was that in Latin America there was peace and
stability, but no preparation for independence, while the
English colonists had both.

There had been, in the older days of Spain, a genuine
tendency toward popular liberty. The spirit remained but
the methods were changed under Philip II, who inaugu-
rated the colonial era, and the training for the future of in-
dependence was entirely lacking. These facts must be re-
membered in order to understand the politics and tendencies
of today in Latin America. Under Spain power was per-

Politics and Progress 207

sonal, depending directly from the king. When the revolu-
tions came, the need was for someone who embodied the
power that was once vested alone in royalty and its min-
ions. Prejudice and demagoguery held sway and the cling-
ing to this leader and to that, and the struggle between the
chieftains, became the outstanding facts of Latin American
history for half a century. The very background here
traced indicates the difficult beginnings of the new repub-
lics, and the fact that these troubles were not due to inca-
pacity of the racial stock, European or Indian or mixed
though it be, but go back directly to the political education
and limited opportunities of the colonials during the three
centuries of their dependency.

The revolts of the Spanish colonies against the mother
country had their direct origin in political difficulties on the
peninsula. Napoleon, invading Spain in 1808, had forced
the abdication of Charles IV and renunciation of all claim
to the throne by his son, Ferdinand. Napoleon's brother
Joseph was made king of Spain. The Spanish people, sur-
prised and outraged, formed juntas of rebellion against the
new regime and declared their allegiance to the crown
prince, as Ferdinand VII. When the news and the orders
to obey the decrees and officers of Joseph Bonaparte were
received in Venezuela and in other centers of Latin Amer-
ica, the people there again protested,, formed, in turn, their
own juntas in favor of Ferdinand and rebellion, although
still under cover, seeped throughout the colonies. Within
two years the Venezuelan junta had deposed the governor-
general of the Bonapartes and had set up in Caracas the first
locally chosen government in Latin America, and the prin-
ciple that the provinces of Spain in America possessed the
right of self-government had been declared. It was written

208 Greater A merica

on the tenuous basis that due to the usurpation of the
throne of Spain by Joseph, no general government existed
either in Spain or the colonies, but none the less the break
was begun. On July 3, 1811, Simon Bolivar, who was to
become one of the great heroes of all the history of repub-
licanism in the world, in an address in Caracas said:

What care we if Spain submits to Napoleon Bonaparte, if we have
decided to be free? Let us without fear lay the corner stone of South
American freedom. To hesitate is to die.

The pages of this book are no place to recite the long his-
tory of the struggle for independence in Latin America.
There are few pages more heroic in all history, for the
flame swept from Mexico to the Rio de la Plata and Chile,
and leaders of legendary glory arose and fought and fell.
The era of revolutions also recorded not alone the series of
stupendous personal achievements that dwarf even the rec-
ords of the Conquest, but it saw the brilliant fires of a hun-
dred idealists, struggling to solve the growing political
problems in the halls of their myriad succeeding congresses.
Declarations of independence crowd upon one another be-
tween 1810 and 1824, and a literature of political philosophy
that fills miles of shelves poured out to explain and justify,
and to plan for the glorious future of independence.

The final battle of the independence was fought on De-
cember 9, 1824, on the plains at Ayacucho, high in the
Peruvian Andes. One of the greatest and most unselfish of
all the leaders of the revolution, Marshal Antonio Jose de
Sucre, led the combined forces of Argentina, Chile, Peru
and Greater Colombia to this victory, which broke the
power of Spain in America, and was followed, only a few
years later, by recognition by the mother country of the
last of the revolutionary governments.

Politics and Progress 209

Bitter years followed the triumph of the revolution
against Spain. Bolivar himself, looking back discouraged
on his failures to achieve the ideals for which he and so
many gallant men had fought, wrote in his later years:

"Those who have toiled for liberty in South America have
ploughed in the sea!"

He predicted, even, the long period of revolution follow-
ing revolution and the bitter personalism of the battles, but
through it all, save in moments of black discouragement
and illness, he saw that the end would come in better days
and sounder democracy than was possible for lesser men
even to dream of in those cruel days. The background
which explains much of these difficulties has been set down
briefly earlier in this chapter. The years that have followed
the death, in poverty and in a borrowed bed, of the great
Bolivar have recorded, despite many slips back, a long
climb upward.

The years immediately following the revolution against
Spain were difficult years, crowded with ugly pictures.
That post-revolutionary period gives another important key,
however, to the understanding of the immediate and sub-
sequent political history in Latin America. The first efforts
to build the new governments had virtually nothing to start
upon, unlike the colonies that had become the United States.
The result was that, perforce, they started with the central
government, when the more solid growth of the United
States could fortunately be based on the self-sufficient
thirteen original states. They had from Spain the inherit-
ance of Roman law, with its codes and procedure, but this
legal structure needed a far stronger governing power than
did the Common Law of England which the United States

210 Greater A merica

could and did adopt bodily. The Latin Americans, seeking
a more workable legal instrument, early adopted the Na-
poleonic code, which was still a somewhat untried regimen
but which had its form and strength from the older Roman
code which the Latin Americans knew well.

But laws were not all; they had need of a new form of
government, as the only form they had known was a direct
gift from an absolute monarch, and poor groundwork for
republics. They had to find a way to eliminate the personal
and to establish, what they had not known or dreamed of
before, the rule of institutions rather than men. From this
need, and from the bitterness of the controversy which grew
out of it, came the one great issue of the generations that
followed the revolutions.

Looking back to those days, and seeking for a simplifica-
tion of their struggles in their oratory and pamphlets, there
emerges one issue almost alone which divided the leaders
after the victory. This was the choice of a centralized or
as they called it Unitarian government, as against the de-
centralized or federal union type. France is today the ex-
ample of the first, the United States, of course, of the second.
All through the gaudy history of dictatorships, revolutions,
and changing constitutions in the countries of Spanish
America has run the thread of the controversy over the
choice of the form of constitutional democracy.

The distance from the achievement of independence to-
day along the line of these divisions is not long, but its
threads weave through a thousand byways. Primarily, in
the revolt from Spain, the leaders sought in written con-
stitutions and in the examples of other lands some quick
and easy solution of their problems of government. The
United States was the primary ideal, and the first efforts

Politics and Progress 211

were to form, similarly, central governments with self-gov-
erning states or provinces. But in many cases the provinces
did not exist, although the old Spanish administrative units
did give an apparently more solid basis for such divisions
than existed, for instance, in the new territories that were
carved on straight lines in the United States out of the west-
ern areas. But the difficulty lay in the fact that, generally
speaking, the areas of Latin America were units (vice-
royalties, captaincies-general and down through the smaller
divisions) tending always toward disunion, while the thir-
teen original states in the North were definitely separated
entities tending, through many tribulations, toward union.
The contrast was sharp, and it presented the primary diffi-
culty in the formation of sound governments in revolu-
tionary Latin America.

The centralized type of government had, and still has,
its difficulties in Latin America, for on both sides are arrayed
fundamental forces. The ancient Spanish capitals, Mexico,
Bogota, Caracas, Lima, and Buenos Aires, were, generally
speaking, strongholds for centralized governments while
the provinces and the interior believed they would have
greater voice in politics through the f ederalized type of rule.
The idea of centralization was also essentially Spanish, and
of the upper classes, while the idea of a federal republic was
generally supported by the mixed-bloods and the Indians.
The great dictators, O'Higgins in Chile, Rosas in Argentina,
Guzman Blanco and Gomez in Venezuela, Diaz in Mexico,
Leguia in Peru were powerful factors in centralization, even
when they had no constitutions that justified it. The local
chieftains, jealous of their own power, were the supporters
of the federal form of government until they themselves
rose to the dictator's chair.

Philosophers and the lawyers have divided themselves all

212 Greater America

through Latin American history, urging the centralized
government as a policy of realism, or the decentralized as
the only basis of sound democracy. Bloody battles have
been fought, the revolutions of the past hundred years have
been waged, dictators have risen, served their time and gone,
all in the name of this endless controversy. The inevitable
basis of all revolution, of every coup d'etat against a dic-
tator, is his centralization of power, and the first effect of
each turnover is to give more power to the provinces, only
in the end to have them turn their strength back to a new
central government in which their oWn newly chosen chief-
tain dominates.

Even the Latin American revolutions of recent years are
explainable) best, perhaps, in these terms, although the char-
acteristics are less clearly set forth than in the earlier period.
The Argentine revolution against President Hipolito Irigo-
yen in 1930 was in large part based on his invasion of the
rights of the provinces and the political chicanery which
placed his regime in the class of the ancient caudittos.
Chile's political difficulties go back to a constitution that
achieved decentralization through an all-powerful Con-
gress; the abuse of the power taken from Congress and re-
turned to the executive in 1926 was the deep cause of the
revolution which overthrew President Carlos Ibanez in
1931. Porfirio Diaz in Mexico had nullified the federal, de-
centralized forms of the Mexican constitution, and his cen-
tralization of power in the end brought on his downfall, in
1911, as a not dissimilar attitude did that of Augusto B.
Leguia in Peru in 1930. The dictatorships of Latin Amer-
ica have fallen, almost always, on account of the refusal of
the dictators to recognize the political demands of other,
if lesser, leaders. They have left ruin and chaos behind
them, not because the leaders were failures, or their ad-

Politics and Progress 213

ministrations corrupt, but because their centralization of the
power in opposition to written federal constitutions sapped
the springs of political growth and no new leaders could
rise and prove themselves without meeting the challenge of
revolution.

The revolution has thus slowly been inculcated as an es-
sential element of the politics of Latin America. Its roots
are in the habit of dictatorships, and yet revolution repre-
sents, actually, a step in democratic development, for be-
yond revolution is democracy, as surely in Colombia and
Argentina and Peru today as it was in the United States in
1776. The road, only, has been confused by imported ele-
ments, by the difficulties inherent in the past, and by the
vicious circle which is its own perpetuating factor. The
very earliest revolutions against Spain brought forth strong
men who, ruling in their turn as presidents, found a single
powerful head the most practicable and efficient form of
government. They found it difficult, however, to raise up
successors to themselves, or to pass the power on even to
selected men without the trial of battle. Democracy and
elections were largely names, and are so to this day in most
of the countries. Peace, after revolution, has come through
strong men and few indeed have been the strong men who
have been willing or even able to step down from power to
stand behind their successors to allow them to find their
feet and to pass on the power, in their turn, to others.

Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia (in-
cluding present-day Panama), Ecuador and Peru (then in-
cluding Bolivia) foresaw, with that wisdom that makes him
one of the outstanding political philosophers of our history,
the great problems of republican government in those po-
litically unschooled nations. He believed that they could

214 Greater America

best be ruled by strong men, but he foresaw and predicted
the difficulties of the transfer of power from one strong
man to another and sought to solve the issue, in the consti-
tution of Bolivia and in Greater Colombia, by providing for
a president for life, with power to name his successor. Yet
he foresaw, in the end, the evolution of noble democracies,
based on education and the slowly broadening sense of re-
sponsibility in peoples, and even in his deepest gloom, never
despaired of the outcome. The records of recent years in
Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Uruguay have proven the
soundness of his faith. The road is a very long one, up
that steep hill of democracy, and the record of advance must
be taken over the long grade, and not from minor slips back
in the shifting sands and snows of the ascent. Conditions
of government and suffrage have repeated, through the
years, the desperation of the situations in the United States
prior to their revolution, when there was no way out ex-
cepting by the appeal to force. The "right of revolution" is
a real issue, and a live one, in Latin America still. It is not
to be assumed, however, that all or any particularly over-
whelming proportion of their revolutionary movements
even of the past were really justified, or were all idealistic;
the abuse of that "right" is still general.

The advance of the countries of Latin America to true
suffrage has been a slow and uncertain advance, but there
has been distinct movement forward to that end through
all the century of independence. Uruguay has been a real
democracy for almost its whole history since 1828. Argen-
tina achieved it next, probably, but there was a long pause.
Argentine suffrage is now compulsory and secret, and is
definitely effective. Chile, in 1920, elected a man of the
people, to the immense surprise of the aristocrats who, how-

Politics and Progress 215

ever, had the vision to refuse to protest a close vote which
they might have won in Congress but which would have
stirred bitter feelings. A few years later Honduras had a
genuine election, which frankly surprised the political
bosses. Nicaragua, in elections supervised at its request by
United States Marines, has had two genuine elections in re-
cent years. Colombia held a genuine free and eff ective elec-
tion in 1930, and Mexico has certainly been expanding its
electoral body by the process of making its adequate election
laws increasingly effective.

In the elections which in 1931 wound up the revolution-
ary movements of several countries, the suffrage was shown
to be a better tool than in the past. El Salvador, without a
revolution, chose its president out of a lively campaign with
five candidates. Chile, following a communistic uprising in
1931 chose a conservative leader by a sound popular vote.
Peru, in the first real election perhaps in, its history, got out
the vote on all sides, and the creakings of the new and
elaborately cumbersome electoral machinery seemed to in-
dicate the sincerity of the effort.

On the other hand, the electoral organization of many
countries) is still in the stage of idealistic constitutional pro-
visions and laws, with little effect in extending the right to
vote to the lower ranges of society. Brazil has always been
ruled by oligarchies, although usually able ones; the election
of the first popularly chosen president is yet to come, but is
certainly in the minds of the leaders and is being definitely
approached. The ignorant Indian populations of Bolivia
and of Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico as well, make
true suffrage difficult and, its achievement, before education
has penetrated more deeply, of questionable wisdom.
Venezuela is of course a dictatorship and, at the other ex-

216 Greater America

treme, Costa Rica, which has long had an effective suffrage,
chooses its executives from the cream of national leadership,
but after the fine oligarchies of the country have prepared
a single "slate." There is no intention here to say that
suffrage is really attained widely in Latin America, but it
certainly is on the road to achievement, despite recent revo-
lutions and the slow processes inherent in any such great
social advancement.

The obvious difficulties with which each step recorded
here has been taken explain more than one phase of the
problem of government in Latin America. It explains, in
part, the reason for being of the "right of revolution," for
where there was no chance for a decision at the polls in
favor of any but the government controlling the election
machinery, there existed no remedy against bad govern-
ment excepting revolution. The political philosopher who
even today would argue against revolution, in many of the
countries, has difficult going when he meets this solid rock
of an ineffectual suffrage.

The slow advance of the Latin American nations toward
true democracy, but their effective advance despite that
slowness, is again a guarantee, it would seem, of their ulti-
mate success with the processes of democracy. It is an
axiom of political history that only rights and privileges
which are gained with difficulty are either prized or used
effectively. By this standard, certainly, the nations of Latin
America should prize, and hold long, their democratic gains
when they finally become fully effective. It is worthy of re-
mark that their devotion to democratic ideals through a
long history of difficulties would indicate that communism,
no less than monarchy, will find scant ground for growth
in their aspiring political gardens.

Politics and Progress 217

Communism has, indeed, raised its ugly head many times
in Latin America and in the period of political difficulties
which came during the depression of 1931 the solution of
communism was offered to the people in the Latin Ameri-
can republics, as elsewhere. There has been persistent com-
munistic propaganda throughout the countries, directed
with some deliberation against the United States as well as
against the local "capitalistic" governments. That this di-
rection has been from Moscow is admitted frankly by the
Russians, as they also admit the part played by Mexican
communists and, during certain regimes there, by official
Mexican propagandists. Mexico has generally denied this
part, however.

The essential bases of Latin American social organization
are not, however, instinctively friendly to the communistic
idea as it has been developed in Russia. The Indian com-
munism which is cited so often as indicating a line of com-
mon thought between Russia and the Indians of Latin
America is centuries away from the Russian idea. It is based
on communal farming lands, on water rights, and withal
on the holding of communal properties under the benefi-
cent headship of a monarchical government. Latin America
has no instinctive link to Russia, although this does not
mean that such a link may not be created artificially.

It seems safe to predict, however, that whatever may be
the temporary solutions of political and economic difficul-
ties, and however these may seem to tend toward modern
communism, the Latin American countries will, in their
own good time, swing back safely into their steady climb
toward democracy.

In the revolutionary history of Latin America, the influ-
ence of the United States has been very great. Although

2i8 Greater A menca

this is treated more extensively in the chapter on Foreign
Relations, it is necessary to note here that most revolution-
ary movements in Mexico and the Caribbean countries
either start with filibustering expeditions equipped secretly
in the United States or else reach a point at some stage of the
trouble when an appeal is made by one or the other side for
intervention by the United States. The attitude of Wash-
ington in such cases has of necessity to be a support of the
existing government, a position not always justified by the
record of such government. Under a Pan-American treaty,
the United States must refuse arms shipments to the rebels,
if the existing government so requests. It cannot, even sur-
reptitiously (which the revolutionists always vainly hope it
will) interfere against the government. Its only aid has
been to declare "neutral zones" for the protection of foreign
interests and this it has done several times in Nicaragua, to
the great benefit of the faction defending the section so
isolated. In 1931, this policy was apparently discarded ex-
cept in case of the actual failure of the local authorities to
furnish protection. The result may perhaps be less revolu-
tion, but unfortunately, probably, less justified revolution, as
the unjustified type never hoped for aid from the United
States in any case.

Beginning with 1930, a new element entered into politics
in Latin America, the economic factor. Falling com-
modity prices and the sudden stoppage of the foreign loans
that had been pouring in for the development of ports and
highways, railwavs and government and private projects of
every sort, brought on bitter difficulties for the people and
for the ruling classes and the armies that had fattened in
times of prosperity. Service on the foreign debts became a
terrible burden on government, taxation increased, the ship-

Politics and Progress 219

ment of gold reserves to pay interest damaged exchange and
brought lowered prices and higher living costs. The gov-
ernments were held to blame, as they were all around the
world in those bitter times, and in Latin American coun-
tries the recourse was to the old, old remedy, revolution.
Economic at base, the manifestations were political, and al-
though the cuartdazo (or barrack uprising) served as the
medium in most cases, bloody battle followed in those coun-
tries, like Cuba, where the army had been held intact and
loyal to the government.

While these uprisings were primarily economic, they
were also directed, usually, against dictators of a modern
type made stylish again by similar forms of government
in Europe following the Great War. Leguia in Peru, Iri-
goyen in Argentina, Ibanez in Chile, Machado in Cuba, had
all perpetuated themselves (some through patriotism and
others through personal ambition) on the ground of the
crisis and the need of continuing policies for the national
good. The revolts against them were holocausts politically
and the upheavals gave little or no relief economically.
The revolt against economic ills entered into the long his-
tory of Latin American revolution, but it was not without
its lessons and its promise.

Popular government, in demand at least, has probably
been advanced by a generation as a result of that series of
revolts. A government answerable to the people has be-
come a recognized need. Where that right already existed
and was suppressed, as in Argentina by Irigoyen, the demand
was imperious that it be corrected. In the countries where
representative election has not yet been attained, it will be
a hardy president who in the future will dare to seek to
perpetuate himself by the old methods. In many of the
countries which have suffered from these recent revolutions,

220 Greater A merica

the type of ruler who gains the power has been distinctly
lower than those supplanted, itself a move backward in the
line of dictatorships, but certainly forward toward the time
when the demands will be for truly representative govern-
ment and not for new dictators.

And what, then, of that progress in the recent past and
looking into the future? Argentina, so recently as the nineties
of the last century, forced from an unwilling oligarchy the
"law of the dark closet" or in other words the private vot-
ing booth, and compulsory voting. Chile has hewed its way
through the difficulties of a former constitution that tried
to combine the separation of the executive and legislative
functions as in the United States with a presidential cabinet
responsible to the Senate, and which was forced to resign
when its policies (which were of course those of the presi-
dent) were disapproved. Colombia proved, in 1929, that its
electoral machinery was workable, even if a little rusty,
when it elected to the presidency the first Liberal in recent
history. In Mexico a "strong man" who was a virtual dic-
tator declined re-election and stood firmly behind the two
presidents who succeeded him, and suffrage there ap-
proaches genuine reality. Thus the signs of democratic
growth loom and multiply through the passing years.

There is one element in Latin American political philoso-
phy that is, the philosophy of the common man which
is too seldom realized, although it is a permanent and power-
ful factor for stability. This is the inherent popular liberty
which is the ancient and essential characteristic of the
Spaniard. No peasantry in Europe is more self-assertive,
more sure of itself, more dignified in its taking of its rights,
than that of Spain. Servility is foreign to the national spirit,
and the history of the Spanish revolution of 1931 proved

Politics and Progress 22*

what those who knew Spain well have always said of the
Spaniards, that they bent the knee to none, save God, and
that the king was of necessity a Spaniard first and a king
second. That spirit did not change when the Spaniards came
to America, as those know well who know the southern
nations of the continent and the dwellers of those other
lands where the mixture with the Indians has not brought
in a strain of servile slavery which is not Spanish.

Indeed, at the risk of entering into that controversy which
this book seeks to avoid, it might be pointed out again that
the whole strength of the countries of Latin America has
been in their holding to Spanish and Portuguese inherit-
ances rather than to Indian. The Indian, as suggested, might
well have developed his own civilization had he had another
thousand years at his command, but those thousand years
were not vouchsafed him, and what he has had to contribute
to government and to culture have of necessity been strictly
limited. He has given strength, the virility of the soil in
which he has grown for his countless generations before the
white man came, and he has given charm, artistry and me-
chanical skill but his hope, and the hope of his white strain,
are politically, certainly, in the world of today and not in
the world of yesterday. Latin America has indeed deep
foundations upon which to build, and they have become the
stronger as it has approached more and more closely to the
political ideals and standards of the modern world to which
its people, as those of Saxon America, so thoroughly belong.

Chapter XI
NATIONALISM AND FOREIGN RELATIONS

THE twenty nations of Latin America are distinct peoples,
intensely nationalistic, proudly patriotic. Spanish and Indian
heritages, the lasting regionalism of the one and the tribalism
of the other, are primarily responsible, but the isolation be-
tween the various units deliberately set up by Spain during
the colonial era was highly important, and in the wars of
independence there was little or no confusion of the iden-
tities of the revolutionary military units. All of the countries
as they exist today, with the exception of Bolivia, Uruguay
and Panama, whose national entities were later established,
and Cuba, whose independence came in 1898, go back to
the revolutions against Spain, France and Portugal

Only two even partially successful efforts have ever been
made to unite independent nations in Latin America into
any form of union. The reference is to Bolivar's "Greater
Colombia," now broken into four nations, and to the Central
American Union, twice established and as often broken up
into the five countries of the Isthmus. On the other hand,
there have been those three breakings-up of the original
national units. Bolivia was taken from Peru by the liberators
in 1825, immediately after independence, Uruguay separated
from Argentina in 1828, and Panama from Colombia in
1903. There have long been signs that Brazil will not
always remain a unit, but may separate into at least two
nations, but each crisis that passes without this division tak-
ing place makes its ultimate realization less likely.

The influence which, as everywhere, has been the most
direct determinant of nationalism is, however, the relation

222

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 223

of these nations with one another and with the world out-
side. Along almost every boundary there has been at some
time or another a point of controversy. The similarity of
products has stimulated trade barriers. And always outside
has loomed, not an aggressive Europe or Asia, but an aggres-
sive protector the United States whom legend and patri-
otic fervor have often embodied with imperialistic designs
and ruthless power. These situations, fed by local politicians
whose glory and position have seemed always to depend on
fear of the world outside, have built a firm nationalism that
is at base patriotic and yet has many falsities that make the
realization of the dream of a closer-drawn America the more
necessary for this very opposition.

The boundary disputes of Latin America go back directly
to the colonial days and to the sweeping decrees that laid
out viceroyalties and provinces with the same splendid
gestures that made personal gifts of tribes of Indians and
river valleys from watershed to watershed. America was
vaguely divided between Spain and Portugal, at the very
beginning, by the uncertainties of a Papal Bull and the
treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. By these arrangements Portugal
obtained possession of the lands of the New World up to
an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands,
and Spain took all the rest. This line strikes South America
at the mouth of the Amazon and, combined with the claims
of the Portuguese explorers, gave the basis for the Portuguese
holding of Brazil. The Spanish section was divided into
administrative units under various names and under rulers
of varying grades, and the nations of the independence made
their claims of territorial division on their vague boundaries.
These divisions included the delimitations of the four viceroy-
alties (Nueva Granada, which is now Colombia, and Buenos

224 Greater America

Aires were added to Mexico and Peru in the Eighteenth
Century), four captaincies-general (Guatemala, Venezuela,
Cuba and Chile), twelve audiencias, somewhat overlapping
the larger divisions, and the innumerable smaller provincial
units which created the territorial limits on whose lines were
carved the nations of Central America, Paraguay and
Uruguay, as well as the smaller political divisions of the
larger countries.

These crudely defined territories gave rise to a long series
of boundary disputes some of which, like that between Chile
on the one hand and Bolivia and Peru on the other, have
resulted in bloody wars. Most of them have been resolved by
friendly arbitrations marked, as is the boundary between
Argentina and Chile, by such final agreements as that
symbolized by the famous Christ of the Andes, with its
sonorous inscription:

Sooner shall these mountains crumble into dust than Argentina
and Chile break the peace which they have pledged at the feet of
Christ the Redeemer.

Indeed, the long series of boundary disputes of Latin
America has been markd by a record of successful arbitration
literally unequaled in history, and in these arbitrations the
United States has played the part of a disinterested and very
practical friend at court. There remain, today, nine boundary
disputes to be settled in Latin America.

One, that over the line between Bolivia and Paraguay in
the Grand Chaco in the far interior of South America, came
close to causing a war that might have involved other South
American countries, in 1929 and 1930, but the machinery set
up by the Pan-American Conferences was set in motion and
successfully held off a resort to arms at that time.

An actually rather more important issue, that between

Nationalism and Foreign Eelations 225

Ecuador and Peru over the 40,000 square miles east of the
crest of the Andes of Ecuador, is being moved slowly toward
settlement. Argentina, early in 1931, brought about a re-
sumption of diplomatic relations between Ecuador and
Colombia, interrupted a few years before because Colombia
had, by another boundary settlement, seemed to recognize
the Peruvian right to this Oriente territory claimed by
Ecuador.

There is still pending the dispute between Argentina and
Uruguay over the sovereignty of the wide estuary of the
Rio de la Plata, the location of the international line having
yet to be determined in that mighty stream.

In Central America there are four boundary disputes, one
of them involving the route of the proposed Nicaraguan
canal, but in all of these the United States has been taking
an active part and peaceful settlements are in sight. The
national line between Haiti and the Dominican Republic
is still to be definitely set.

There remains, also, the boundary dispute between Mexico
and the United States, over the nationality of the Chamizal
tract in the city of El Paso, Texas. This was once on the
Mexican side of the Rio Grande but by a shift in the channel
of that erratic stream has for a generation lain safe, but
unpopulated, on the United States side of the river bed.

These and the more than twenty similar disputes which
are now settled but which have in the past agitated either
the chancelleries or the public, or both, in the countries of
Latin America, have served definitely to sharpen the razor-
edge of nationalism.

The War of the Pacific in 1879, in which Chile took from
Bolivia the nitrate and borax deserts and its port of Anto-
fagasta and thus its outlet to the sea, and from Peru its
nitrate province of Tarapaca, and, by the settlement half a

226 Greater America

century later, half of the provinces of Tacna and Arica, left
bitter feeling. In the course of the long political juggling
over Tacna and Arica, Chile encouraged Ecuador, on the
other side of Peru, in its boundary claims, and so the con-
troversies have fed upon one another.

There have been few wars, however, between the nations
of Latin America. The War of the Pacific between Chile
and Peru was the most effective in changing boundaries.
Paraguay, during the revolution against Spain, met and
repulsed an Argentine army sent to join the interior province
to the rebels of Buenos Aires. From 1864 to 1870, also,
Paraguay, under the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez, fought
Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in a war that stripped Para-
guay of its manhood and resulted in no gains and no changes
in territory or status. In Central America in the course of
the struggles for the formation of the Union and in the
political shiftings of various ambitious dictators, there have
been invasions of neighboring territories but no wars com-
parable either to the War of the Pacific or the Paraguayan
war. The latter was, indeed, one of the most disastrous in
modern history. Virtually all the males except babes and
old men were slain, and the population of Paraguay further
reduced by pestilence and famine from 900,000 to 300,000
in those six awful years.

Of foreign wars the list, too, can be counted on the fingers
of one hand. The historic British occupation of Buenos
Aires was prior to the revolution (1806) but there have been
subsequent British blockades of the port and in 1833 the
British took possession of the Falkland Islands, claimed by
Argentina, and deported the Argentine population to the
mainland.

In 1865, Spain carried out a minor war against Peru in

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 227

which, after Chile had come to the aid of Peru, the Spanish
fleet was beaten off from Callao and abandoned the venture.

In 1864, the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, supported by
the armies of Napoleon III, entered Mexico and was crowned
emperor. He remained in power for three years until, the
Civil War in the United States being finished, Washington,
with the greatest army in the world at its hand, demanded
the withdrawal of the French troops. Maximilian, left to his
fate, was defeated by the Mexicans under Juarez, captured
and executed by a firing squad.

In 1895, the British threat against Venezuela in the
boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana
brought a sharp protest from President Cleveland of the
United States, and a cessation of encroachments. In 1902 a
blockade and threats of bombardment against Venezuelan
ports resulted in a naval demonstration by the United States,
ending the incident.

These, save for the war of independence in Cuba in 1898
and brief blockades and some landings of marines to collect
debts or protect nationals, include the sum total of the for-
eign wars of Latin America. Cuba and Brazil alone took
any active part in the Great War.

Few regions of the world have been so free from foreign
battle in the century that has followed their independence,
and few nations have had to think so little of armament,
certainly none which have the potential riches and the fields
for colonization that are possessed by the nations of Latin
America.

And so we come to the United States and the Monroe
Doctrine. In 1823, when this famous policy was enunciated,
the Latin American nations had not yet fought their way
to the final victory of Ayacucho. They were embryonic as

228 Or eater A merica

yet, living, as nations, only in their grandiloquent declara-
tions of independence. The United States alone, with its
6,000,000 people, and the War of 1812 still rankling, stood
out against a cynical world. President James Monroe, scorn-
ing British willingness to enunciate such a doctrine with him,
on December 2, 1823, announced that the United States
would regard as a threat against its own safety the occupa-
tion or reoccupation of any of the territories of the New
World by a European power, and (speaking to Russia then)
any extension of European Colonies in the New World.

It was a brave announcement, and from a stronger power
might have received immediate challenge. But, too, it was
a statement of the spiritual union of the Americas that
stands as firmly today as it did then, despite the fact that, in
some quarters, it has been interpreted for almost a hundred
years as indicating the thought of the United States of itself
as holding a protectorate over Latin America. Yet unques-
tionably the announcement of the Monroe Doctrine assumed
then, and certainly has been maintained on the assumption,
that all the countries of the Americas were agreed in opposi-
tion to the idea of European aggression. The assumption
of the role of champion by the United States meant little
to the new nations of Latin America in 1823. They were
still busy with their problems of winning the revolution and
at least two of them, Mexico and Greater Colombia, had
as much population, or more, than had the United States,
even if they counted in those figures a great number of
Indians, which the United States did not have.

That the Monroe Doctrine has been effective in protecting
the nations of Latin America from European invasion and
colonization none can deny. The comparison of the maps
of Africa and South America in 1823 and in 1931 made in
a public address in 1931 by the Acting Secretary of State of

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 229

the United States leaves no open ground for discussion there.
Africa, unprotected, has been potted with colonies; Latin
America is freer than it was in 1823. That the intervention
of the United States in the Mexican venture of Napoleon III
in 1867 and in the Venezuelan dispute with Great Britain
in 1895 were definitely effective, is beyond controversy. That
the Monroe Doctrine dissuaded Germany from picking a
quarrel with Brazil in the first years of this century with a
view to taking Southern Brazil as a German colony is also
a generally accepted assumption. The static power of the
United States throughout the first century of Latin American
independence has, in addition to these well-known in-
stances, unquestionably relieved the Latin American nations
from all fear and danger of European or Asiatic encroach-
ment.

But the Monroe Doctrine has become a symbol, in the
minds of many Latin Americans, of the supposed imperial-
ism of the United States. Attacked in public and private,
and in international bodies from the League of Nations and
the Pan-American Conferences down even to medical, edu-
cational and highway conferences assembled for quite in-
nocuous ends, United States officials and publicists have
sought for years to explain and to answer. There is no
intention to succumb to that temptation here.

The United States has chosen, on grounds logically
adequate certainly, to maintain the Monroe Doctrine, op-
posed to European (and by inference to Asiatic) aggression
in the territories of the nations of this hemisphere, as a
purely private doctrine, a doctrine of self-defense. It has
invited the other nations of the Americas to enunciate simi-
lar doctrines, and welcomes such enunciations, but none
responds. Half the leaders of Latin America hold that the
Monroe Doctrine, if it is to be continued, should be a con-

230 Greater America

tinental doctrine, to which all should subscribe and the en-
forcement or application of which should be decided by all
the nations together; the United States sees in this a limita-
tion of its freedom of action which in time of crisis might
be fatal The other half of the Latin American political
leaders hold that there is no longer a need for the Monroe
Doctrine because some of the nations, certainly, have become
world powers, and that in a gesture of good will toward
Latin America it should be proclaimed as abandoned or at
least that North Americans should quit talking about it.

<c We know you have an umbrella and will hold it over us
in casd of rain, but we wish you would not have it up and
over us all the sunny time," they say in effect.

There have been, too, the corollaries of the Monroe
Doctrine. The note of Secretary Olney to the British For-
eign Office on the occasion of the Venezuelan incident of
1895 carried a phrase that still rankles in Latin America, to
the effect that "the United States is practically sovereign
upon this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to
which it confines its interposition."

In 1904 President Roosevelt stated, in his annual message
to Congress, that "the Monroe Doctrine may force the United
States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing
of importance, to the exercise of an international police
power" But J. Reuben Clark, formerly Under Secretary
of State of the United States and later Ambassador to
Mexico, in his quasi-official brochure on the Monroe Doc-
trine published in 1930, noted that this so-called "Roosevelt
Corollary" was to the effect that the United States should
attempt the adjustment of difficulties of weak Latin Amer-
ican nations "lest European Governments should intervene,
and intervening should occupy territory an act which
would be contrary to the principles of the Monroe Doctrine."

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 231

And then he goes on to this virtual withdrawal of the
Roosevelt Corollary as part of the Monroe Doctrine:

"It is not believed that this corollary is justified by the terms of
the Monroe Doctrine, however much it may be justified by the
application of the doctrine of self-preservation."

The Monroe Doctrine is thus subject to interpretation and
to reinterpretation. United States Secretaries of State, and
most particularly Charles Evans Hughes when he held that
office, have again and again reiterated the separation of the
United States policies in the Caribbean from the Monroe
Doctrine. The former, it is pointed out, would have de-
veloped in their present directions, with the Panama Canal,
whether or not there had ever been a Monroe Doctrine.

The literature on the Monroe Doctrine, official and un-
official, is extensive and controversial. It is one of the most
vital of all the foreign policies of the world and it certainly
has been extended to apply to Japan in particular and the
whole world by inference, and even to the aggression of
'American powers in America itself, as for instance, in the
opposition of the United States to the participation of Mexico
in the Nicaraguan revolution in 1927-8. But like all foreign
policies, its interpretations cannot be set down in advance
nor can they be limited. Policies of foreign offices are the
slow growth of the accumulation of decisions, some of
which, like the Roosevelt Corollary, are in time withdrawn
as that has apparently been withdrawn by the official pub-
lication of the Clark report quoted above. But the stream
is seldom turned back; it is rather diverted to new channels,
and the force of the past reinterpreted and redirected*

Such a redirection of the policy of the United States to-
ward Latin America has been in process of realization for
many years. Each administration and each year within those

232 Greater A merica

administrations has seen better relations, less misunderstand-
ing and a greater sympathy in Washington toward the feel-
ings and aspirations of the Latin American countries. The
last words regarding the Monroe Doctrine can well have
been spoken, in the presentation of the factual maps of its
accomplishment for Latin America as compared with the
colonial parcelling of Africa in the 108 years between the
formulation of the Doctrine and the centenary of the death
of President Monroe which gave occasion for the official
publication of this illuminating comparison. Allowing this
to be the final official word on the Monroe Doctrine would
be a milepost in the march toward the co-operation and
friendships of the Greater America.

While Latin America has never taken action to enunciate
a similar doctrine on its own account or to support the
Monroe Doctrine, it has, as a matter of fact, provided two
so-called doctrines which definitely supplement it. These
are called respectively the Calvo and Drago Doctrines. In
1868 Dr. Carlos Calvo, an eminent Argentine jurist, in a
treatise on international law stated that "the collection of
pecuniary claims made by the citizens of one country
against the government of another country should never be
made by force." In 1902, this was reiterated by Dr. Luis M.
Drago, also an Argentine, following the statement by Presi-
dent Roosevelt in connection with the second Venezuelan
incident, that "We do not guarantee any state against punish-
ment if it misconducts itself, provided that punishment does
not take the form of acquisition of territory by any non-
American power." Dr. Drago, who was then foreign min-
ister of Argentina, presented to the United States govern-
ment a memorandum which went several steps further than
Dr. Calvo, declaring that, as the collection of loans by mill-

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 233

tary means implied "territorial occupation to make them
effective," a situation would be created at variance with
President Monroe's pronouncement against the acquisition
of new colonies by European powers and therefore that "the
public debt cannot occasion armed intervention nor even the
actual occupation of the territory of American nations by a
European power."

These two doctrines, the latter including its acceptance of
the Monroe Doctrine in a somewhat left-handed way, are
often cited as Latin American counter-doctrines to that of
Monroe. In actuality they are counter only to the more
recent interpretations of the attitude of the United States
toward punitive or debt-collection expeditions. This attitude
seems well fixed in the foreign policy of the United States
and has often been acted upon by acquiescence to European,
occupations of ports and customhouses in the Caribbean in
order to collect debts and claims. They are taken also to be
supplementary to, and extensions of, the Monroe Doctrine.

There remain, still, the issues of the interventions of the
United States in the domestic affairs of the countries of
Latin America, chiefly those in the Caribbean. Landings of
Marines have been made in these countries dozens of times,
now in the name of protecting the lives and properties of
foreigners, again in the name of peace and order and to pre-
vent a distant or threatened intervention by some Euro-
pean power. These interventions have served, too often, to
perpetuate in office presidents and governments which would
otherwise have fallen by revolution or coup d'etat, and as in
Nicaragua through twelve years of a "legation guard/' to
perpetuate unintentionally a single political dynasty. In
Central America, since 1923, these interventions have ex-
tended to the withholding of recognition from governments

234 Greater A merica

which come to power through revolution, a policy written
into a Central American treaty of that year to which the
United States was a party. Prior to that, this policy had
been applied by President Woodrow Wilson to the end of
ousting President Victoriano Huerta of Mexico.

There has been concern, time and again in the countries
of South America, that this might be applied to themselves,
although the hands-off policy and quick recognition of the
South American revolutionary governments of 1930 by
President Herbert Hoover largely dispelled this apprehen-
sion. Gradually, and with deliberate design, the United
States has sought to withdraw in recent years from all its
interventions, direct and indirect, in Latin America. The
final step was taken, perhaps, on April 17, 1931, when the
government of President Hoover announced with regard
to the latest disturbances in Nicaragua that the United States
"cannot undertake general protection of Americans through-
out that country with American forces. To do so would
lead to difficulties and commitments which this government
does not propose to undertake."

This pronouncement was somewhat modified later, and
its interpretation was clarified as being that the United
States would not intervene unless the police power of the
country in question had fallen down, a condition which, as
events proved, had not taken place in Nicaragua. The
pronouncement was one of those decisions in a specific in-
stance which do not change the obligations or the intentions
of a government, and do not tie its hands for future action.
It did, however, certainly have a reasssuring effect through-
out Latin America and, itself, marks another of the many
steps in the steady development of better relations in the
Americas which were taken under the regime of President
Hoover.

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 235

Latin America has passed out of the age of national in-
fancy and although the world power of the United States
still remains and still, as through the past century, assures
to Latin America the most complete freedom from foreign
influences that is enjoyed in any section of the modern
world today, there is unquestionably a recognition of the
adolescence of some and the full maturity of others of the
nations of Latin America. Perhaps the chief reason for the
continuing (probably for a long time to come) of the deter-
mination of the United States not to tie its hands by alli-
ances, defensive or offensive, with the other countries of the
hemisphere is the recognition of this coming maturity. In
alliances the United States would be forced, by its own great
interests, to dominate. In its relationship of growing co-
operation and insistence at the same time upon the inde-
pendence of action not only of itself but of all the American
nations are, on the other hand, probably the soundest
groundwork for true friendship.

In the national and continental life of the Latin American
nations, the influence of so-called Pan-Americanism has been
far greater than they have always been willing to admit.
The Pan-American Union in Washington has not been a
super-state, nor have its objects been political, but none the
less it has been a unifying factor in political relations. The
idea of international co-operation, that is, effective Pan-
Americanism, has unquestionably advanced further in every
direction in the New World than has any similar move-
ment in the Old. The boundary disputes briefly outlined
earlier in this chapter are, literally, examples to every other
nation in the world in the practical effectiveness of arbitra-
tions. The treaties between the nations of the hemisphere
and even the plans for the codification of international law

236 Greater America

which have been so painstakingly discussed in recent Pan-
American Conferences are not vague ideals, but practical in-
struments tending slowly toward the realization of inter-
national effectiveness. Far from the least of all the grounds
for the hope of making a reality of Greater America has
been the frank and astonishingly open discussion that has
taken place with regard to the bases of co-operation, not in
dozens but in hundreds of directions.

Most of the Latin American nations have from time to
time been members of the League of Nations. Ecuador and
the United States, alone in the Western World, failed to
ratify the Versailles Treaty or to accept, at some time or
another, membership under the invitations extended to neu-
trals. From time to time there have been withdrawals, some
for financial reasons, some for more serious causes. Argen-
tina left the League after the first assembly, to which it was
invited as a neutral in the war, because its proposal for the
immediate entry of Germany was voted down. Six years
later it paid up its arrears in dues. Brazil in 1926 demanded
a permanent seat in the Council, but when this was given
to Germany, Brazil withdrew from the League.

Mexico has made the latest and most dramatic entry into
the League of Nations, in 1931, accepting a long-sought in-
vitation with a reservation to the effect that it could not
subscribe to Article XXI, which excepts "regional under-
standings like the Monroe Doctrine" from the purview of
the League. A similar attitude had been taken previously
by El Salvador, probably at the instance of Mexican diplo-
macy, in 1919 during the negotiation of the Treaty of Ver-
sailles, when El Salvador asked for a statement from Presi-
dent Wilson of what the Monroe Doctrine entailed. Costa
Rica also requested from the League a definition of the

Nationalism and Foreign Eelations 237

scope of the Monroe Doctrine when it was asked to recon-
sider its resignation of 1925.

The attitude of the Latin American countries may be
deduced with some accuracy from these three instances and
also from the fact that Bolivia, supported by Peru, invoked
the interference of the League in the then very delicate
relations with Chile over the status of the disputed provinces
of Tacna and Arica. Latin Americans in general certainly
look upon the League as a potential counterbalance to the
influence of the United States in their own countries and on
the Western Hemisphere, and some continue to have hopes
that the League may ultimately take a part in the balance
of power in the Western World. Membership in the League
of Nations is a part of the major foreign policy of many
governments in the Americas, not necessarily in direct hos-
tility to the United States, but as a canny Spanish provision
against possible need of another powerful friend. The Latin
American membership in the League is numerous and in-
fluential and its eminent jurists and diplomats have sat in
the presidency of the League and are active in its important
committees.

The League has, however, been meticulous in its ob-
servance of the separation of the Old World from the New.
It declined to step into the controversy between Bolivia (and
Peru) and Chile, and it has avoided every appearance of in-
terference in cisatlantic affairs. Its leaders have not, how-
ever, been entirely oblivious to the possibility that the in-
fluence of Latin America may in the end be the factor that
determines the entry of the United States into the League,
and for this reason, as well as for themselves, Latin Amer-
ican membership has been studiously cultivated in and from
Geneva. The secretary general of the League made an ex-
tended trip through Latin America in 1930 both to urge

238 Greater America

renewals of lapsed memberships (the cost of League mem-
bership is a not inconsiderable item to many of the smaller
countries) and to strengthen the ties between the American
nations and Geneva.

Although Europe feels that Latin American importance in
the League may ultimately cause United States politicians to
feel that their country cannot remain outside, it is probable
that the actual effect is diametrically opposite. The problem
in the relations of the countries of the Americas has been, as
Charles Evans Hughes expressed it when he was United
States Secretary of State, that the strong shall not take advan-
tage of their strength, nor, by the same token, that the weak
shall not take advantage of their weakness. The plea of
weakness is likely to be very powerful in Geneva, but
Washington's Latin American policy has been consistently
to work for a growing sense of strength and equality not
always appreciated nor accepted by the Latin American
countries but actually one of the fundamentals of inter-
American relations.

The United States finds its chief difficulty, in Pan-Amer-
ican conferences, in the sense of weakness of certain of the
Latin American nations who feel that they must defend
themselves against the stronger, and particularly the United
States. The effort of all of Washington's diplomacy should
be and, even if unconsciously, often is, to inculcate a sense of
strength, power and therefore of responsibility, in its sister
nations of the hemisphere. Insofar as this is achieved or as
it is approached in actuality, the period of full Pan-Amer-
ican co-operation and understanding begins to dawn. The
League of Nations is not, the wisest observers of Pan-Amer-
ican affairs in Washington feel, the place for this to be
accomplished.

Again we return, even by way of the League of Nation^

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 239

to the movement for Pan-Americanism. With all its ancient
mistakes and misunderstandings of those ends which no
official can admit even as much as they are set down here
Pan-Americanism is forging the links, if not yet the chain,
that will ultimately draw the American nations into the full
and sympathetic understanding whose basic reality it has
been the aim of these pages to seek out in the very peoples
of these nations themselves.

One word should be added here regarding the part which
Porto Rico has played and seems destined to play yet more
extensively in the closer relations of Latin and Saxon Amer-
ica. Porto Rico became a part of the territory of the United
States as a result of the Treaty of Paris which in 1899 ended
the war between Spain and the United States over Cuba.
Its citizens are very largely Spanish, with but little admixture
of Indian blood (although the island's tribes were far ad-
vanced culturally) and with less Negro blood than is usually
understood. Under the rule of the United States they have
developed 1 into excellent administrators and educators, and
in the persons of a growing number of capable technicians,
have contributed considerably to Pan-American technical
congresses. They have become, with some deliberation, a
link of understanding between the United States and Latin
America which is not without promise for the future. Porto
Rican teachers have been trained, in the generation since
their independence under the United States flag, in the
methods of modern education as applied to tropical and
backward peoples and this group, increasing steadily each
year, offers a typical link of service to its Latin American
relations which the United States seems likely some day
to use to its full potentialities.

240 Greater America

In the nationalism, the practical patriotism, which is so
definite a manifestation of life in the nations of Latin Amer-
ica, there has been a gradual shifting of the ground of inter-
national relationships from the controversial to the practical,
from the political to the commercial. Much of this has come
because of the healthy development of the economic life of
those countries through the approach, discussed more exten-
sively in preceding chapters, of economic self -sufficiency and
of a realization of the opportunities for obtaining, through
economic development, a definite, and a proud, place in the
world of today.

To this end the contributions of the mechanical age, and
particularly of the discoveries and inventions and machines
of the United States, have contributed immeasurably. This
contribution is accepted in Latin America as a welcome serv-
ice, one which the United States, and in part Canada as
well, give ungrudgingly and with a profit which puts it
beyond suspicion of ulterior political motives.

The gifts of the mechanical age are, indeed, from the view-
point of their freedom from grounds for suspicion, the
soundest links, as yet, between Latin America and the United
States. They are what the Latin Americans want and seek
in North America, and as such there is no reason for apology
if we use them as the first of the many bonds of the future.
In the field of business there is no question of motive, for
the motive is clear, that is, profit on both sides, with progress
on one and increased and improving markets on the other.
The old resentments are dying away, and to this end not a
little has been contributed by the offerings of business, inven-
tion and finance. So overwhelming in importance is this
fact that it has again and again, throughout this book, taken
the front rank. It docs so, seemingly, in the field of the
foreign relations of Latin America, for it links those relations

Nationalism and Foreign Relations 241

with the growth of healthy and self-sustaining nationalism.
Trade and commerce are becoming the true diplomacy,
and the relations of business men, in contacts where the skill
and intelligence of both sides have equal play, are supplant-
ing the exchanges of politics and the necessity, actual or
feared, for the weaker to take advantage of his weakness or
for the stronger to overbear with his power. Through the
tribulations of the depression of 1931, the whole world
learned the importance of the economic phase of every inter-
national relationship. In those days were laid the founda-
tions for a firm new relationship between the nations of the
American Hemisphere, correlating one another in their
products, finding ways to profit by the contributions of the
other. And in this the United States and Canada have
much to give, and the countries of Latin America much to
return. A new era of foreign relationships rose on the solid
tripod of wiser diplomacy, more intelligent financing, and
profitable commercial exchange.

Chapter XII
THE UNITY OF THE AMERICAS

AMERICA is one! In the pages which have preceded we have
been moving toward one inevitable conclusion. That is,
that the America which extends from pole to pole in the
Western Hemisphere must not only, as the world grows
older, become more and more closely united in thought and
purpose, but that that tendency is here today and that its
achievements have been far from inconsiderable already.
Too many of us, in the friendliest spirit and with the
sincerest anxiety have, in our search for truth, accepted the
easy cliches of other times, have been impressed by the
fumings of those who would divide us through fear or
jealousy or any of a thousand motives. Criticism on both
sides there is and will continue to be, but for years that
criticism has been as within a family, of the younger for
the elder and, most certainly, of the elder with some im-
patience for the younger. But understanding there is, as
well, and growing understanding.

The pride and self-assertion of the Argentine, the firm and
humorous assurance of the Chilean, the frankly American
manners of the Mexican, are traits that have come to mean,
to the Saxon American, just what they mean when he finds
them in his own people. And the pride and bombast that
the European notes in the North American tourist, the Latin
American freely proceeds to remove from the mentality of
that peculiar animal with a firmness that is the more effec-
tive because it quite understands what it is all about.

All these are patent facts. Behind them are certain reali-
ties that have been suggested in the pages which have gone

242

The Unity of the Americas 243

before. The European can, he insists, pick out a citizen of
the United States though he be dressed from top to toe in
the raiment of whatever land he is visiting, and even though
he wears ho horn-rimmed spectacles. The type is definite
and persists through every class. Yet that same European
has been confusing the South American with the North
American for many years, and save only for the fact that
most of the tourists from Latin America in Europe are of
the classes which enjoy wealth and culture, the analogy
might be proven complete in Europe itself.

A generation ago a prophetess whose writings are still
inspiring to many thousands declared that in the Americas,
without distinction, was being evolved what she called the
"sixth race," a type new aftd apart from the great past of
humanity. Often it has seemed as if the growing likeness
of thought and of reaction to similar stimuli on the part of
Saxon and Latin Americans were proving that Madame
Blavatsky was indeed a true seer. As has been suggested
in the chapter of "The Coming of Populations," there are
similarities between Latin Americans and Saxon Americans
that make the one closer to his northern cousin than to his
brothers in Spain and Portugal, and the other closer to the
other Americans than to England. Both strains are mixed,
and exceedingly mixed, and each has in the past clung to the
language and standards of European forebears. Yet today,
certainly in many things, there is a tendency to draw closer,
and in much that already exists is a similarity of standards
and action that mean more than we have been ready, easily,
to accept.

A great deal of nonsense has been written, talked and
believed, about the differences between the Saxon American
and the Latin American. On the ground of values (as of

244 Greater America

wealth versus culture for instance), on the ground of art
and culture, on the ground of ideals of government, individ-
ualism, religions and the rest, confusion has been feeding
upon itself for a century and more. The fine fervor with
which Henry Clay saw in the struggling republicans of
Latin America brother-in-arms in the great battle for human
rights has been lost sight of, and in proportion as it has dis-
appeared new difficulties and new misunderstandings have
rooted themselves in the controversies but not in the sup-
posed divergencies.

It is amusing to realize that the much-vaunted practicality
of the Anglo-Saxon, of the Nordic if you will, has followed
his adaptation to his own problems, in the past century, of
the practical, scientific, cold-blooded philosophy of the Latin
or more broadly of the Mediterranean races. The Greeks
based their artistic harmonies on the most perfect mathema-
tical precisions, the Romans built the empire which is re-
corded history has endured longest of all the world powers
that man has built, on scientific law, precision of military
art, a system of jurisprudence that is the model of our own
age. All these heritages are Latin, or have come down to us
through the Latin side of our long past. They exist, in their
full powers, today in Latin America.

Only where there is the Indian, that is the Asiatic, the
ancient and implacable foe for thousands of years of Saxon
and Latin alike, is there basic misunderstanding. And
although Indianism would convince the world that it is re-
viving in Mexico and is a threatening force in Peru, Bolivia
and Guatemala, in actuality it is falling to its last defeat
after four centuries to rise (with its sound and vivid vital
force, as it has always bloomed in rare individuals) in a
finer and more human Latinism, Europeanism, Aryanism
what you will in the era of scientific, engineering and in-

The Unity of the Americas 245

dustrial development which is upon us all. Latin America
is but taking back its own when it embraces the gifts o
practicality which the Saxon American culture offers him
for his salvation and for the rebuilding of his Indian peoples.

The culture of Latin America and the culture of Saxon
America are at base one. Both proceed from the fountain-
head of Europe, both have been filtered through the rigors
of the life of pioneers, the adaptations to new environments
and the absorption of native elements. In literature there
is no separation; the classic mould is the basis throughout,
and the modern style of fiction and the most modern dialectic
and belles lettres are found in both. In music, the sources
are identical, with a bit more leaning to the Italian than to
the German, in Latin America, as" compared with the rather
broader musical cosmopolitanism of the North, but there is
no great division. In painting and sculpture the standards
are the same, in many ways ridiculously the same. And
the much abused United States motion picture causes, cer-
tainly, less violent pains to the Latin American than to,
perhaps, even the Canadian and certainly thai* it does across
the Atlantic. There seems, in the broad analysis, hardly the
vestige of a controversy over the much discussed need of
"cultural understanding" between the Americas save only
in a wider recognition of the achievements of one another.

Again, the pages of this book leave no place for a broad
discussion of cultural, educational or even general intellec-
tual tendencies. The separation that there has been between
the nations is largely the separation of lack of knowledge
and therefore of lack of understanding. The Saxon Amer-
ican has been busy, for the crowded generations past, with
his material progress, the Latin American delaying his own
until, as in recent years, he has been able to see the road

246 Greater America

ahead and the ultimate possibilities of advance through the
rigorous effort that progress imperiously demands. Through
those years, however, the contributions of science to Latin
America have been notable, in works of sanitation and in
the establishment of public services of a thousand sorts.
The great social welfare foundations have carried the tangi-
ble proofs of United States social idealism to far places, and
engineering has broken down the barriers of aeons and in
these latter years has been offering, to the very hands of the
Latin American themselves, the tools for their own emanci-
pation. Capital, in the brief glimpse of its potentialities in
the rich investment period of 1923 to 1929, has offered pos-
sibilities of growth and self-development similar to those
which built the miracle of the progress of the United States
in the crowded period following the Civil War. Upon all
this have lain the fallow recent years of economic difficul-
ties and the promise that in an emerging world Latin Amer-
ica could, and would, climb side by side with North Amer-
ica in economic, political and social advance.

The deep-founded groundings of co-operation have come
into new reality. The Pan-American Union, that bureau
established in 1889 as a commercial office for the Latin
American republics in Washington, has already grown with
its opportunities to offer co-operation that its founders barely
guessed it could ever achieve. Six great congresses of the
governments of the American nations have met under its
aegis, and a hundred specialized conferences on finance,
commerce, health, science, engineering, highways, customs,
libraries, education, etc., have met and made, each one,
steps long or short as might be, in the advance toward greater
understanding and, what is more important, toward truer
cooperation. The miracle of the political and economic

The Unity of the Americas 247

progress of the United States itself has been mirrored there.
In the next few years this body, with all its potentialities,
will furnish a rallying point for inter-American progress;
this lies clear before it in the pregnant quarter-century ahead.
In the past there has been dour suspicion that the Pan-
American Union was dominated by the United States, that
its function was that of a "colonial office." In weathering that
storm of suspicion and becoming in full reality the symbol
and the tool of inter-American co-operation it seems to have
proven the soundness of the ideals that formed it and the
deep, if not the surface, faith of the national governments
which support it.

In looking forward into the future, it seems sure that legal
and political standards will remain, as they are, separated.
Both Saxon and Latin America have built solidly on their
heritages from their differing European origins. It seems
sure, on the other hand, that educational standards will tend
more to a common type, based primarily on, the ideals and
methods of the United States, for great educators from Latin
America, generations ago, took those methods back to their
countries with them, and slowly they have filtered through
until they are now standard. The problems of tropical edu-
cation and education of backward peoples are slowly being
solved, in large part on the basis of United States experi-
ence and experiment; this is a gift which is taken willingly
in Latin America, and will be more and more welcomed.

In commercial life, in its broadest sense, again the ten-
dency is more and more toward the full adaptation of
United States methods and of its materials and machinery,
for virtually every youth who seeks technical education goes
not to Europe but to the United States, while the trend in
artistic education continues, and justly, toward Europe.

248 Greater America

Through those means the new nations will be developed
rapidly and surely into producing and self-sustaining eco-
nomic units, the basis, always, of progress and human
comfort.

That the real bond between North Americans and Latin
Americans is economic, is the phrase that comes increasingly
even to the lips of sane and realistic Latin American ob-
servers. Every page of this book, and of every sincere study
of the needs and trends of Latin America today, confirms
its reality. Greater America is not an abstraction; it is al-
ready an actuality of engineering, of machines, of commerce
in all its myriad phases, from the simplest commodity ex-
change to the secrets of the inner sanctums of international
finance. Its development in cultural and artistic fields will
grow on these firm foundations.

The Greater America, then, is a reality founded firmly not
alone on the needs of the American nations or of the world,
but on the very tendencies and Teachings of the peoples
themselves. The gods have formed, here, one of the mighty
new forces in history, and human instinct, ambition and
effort have turned that force to the building of the founda-
tions of a structure to which future ages will turn for their
refreshing and perhaps for their very lifeblood. The need
of today is for understanding and appreciation, the one of
the other, and to this understanding we are moving with
firmer tread through the channels of our common interests
in commerce, in culture and in our continental destiny.

THE END.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The author makes acknowledgment to the Columbus
Library of the Pan-American Union, Washington, for its
courtesy in permitting him to make use of its list as the
base material for this presentation.

In general, all the books named are now in print, and can
be purchased at the price given. Only books in English
are listed.

Inclusion here does not indicate endorsement of the mat-
ter or of the material. The books have, however, been
selected with some care and as a result of much reading.

The general books are listed first, and the classification is
thereafter by countries or regions.

GENERAL BOOKS

Adams, R. G., A History of the Foreign Policy of the United States.

Macmillan, 1924. $3.50.

Akers, C. E., A History of South America. Dutton, 1930. $5.00.
Alvarez, A., The Monroe Doctrine. Oxford University Press, 1924.

$3.00.

Anderson, I., Circling South America. Marshall Jones, 1928. $4.00.
Angell, H., Simon Bolivar, South American Liberator. Norton,

1930. $3.00.

Babson, R. W., Future of South America. Little, 1915. $2.50.
Bard, H. E., South America. Heath, 1916. 80 cents.
Batson, Alfred, Vagabond's Paradise. Little Brown, 1931. $2.50.
Bingham, Hiram, Across South America. Houghton Miffiin, 1911.

$5.00.
Blakeslee, G. H., The Recent Foreign Policy of the United States.

Abingdon Press, 1925. $2.00.
Brady, George S., Railways of South America, Part I, Argentina

(for Part II, see Long, W. Rodney). Government Printing

Office, 1926. 50 cents.

Bryce, James, Viscount, South America. Macmillan, 1914. $4.50.
Bullard, A., American Diplomacy in the Modern World. University

of Pennsylvania Press, 1928. $1.50.

251

252 Greater America

Carpenter, F. G., Lands of the Caribbean. Doubleday, Doran, 1925.
4.00.

Carter, J., Conquest. America's Painless Imperialism. Harcourt,
1928. $2.50.

Cherrie, G. K., Dark Trails: Adventures o a Naturalist. Putnam,
1930, $5.00.

Clark, J. Reuben, Memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine. Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1930. 40 cents.

Cleven x N. A. N., Readings in Hispanic American History. Ginn,

1927. $3.50.

Coester, A., The Literary History of Spanish America. Macmillan,

1928. $3.00.

Cooper, C. S., Latin American Men and Markets. Ginn, 1927. $3.00.
Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, Annual Report of Council.

London, n Moorgate. 8s.

Council on Foreign Relations, Survey of American Foreign Rela-
tions, 1928. Yale University Press. $5.00.
Crowther, S., The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics.

Doubleday, Doran, 1929. $5.00.
Dennis, A. L. P., Adventures in American Diplomacy. Dutton, 1928,

$5.00.
Denny, Ludwell, We Fight for Oil. Knopf, 1928. $3.00.

America Conquers Britain. Knopf, 1930. $4.00.
Dickey, H. S., and Daniel, H., The Misadventures of a Tropical

Medico. Dodd, 1929. $3.50.
Domville-Fife, C. W., Among Wild Tribes of the Amazon. Lippin-

cbtt, 1925. $7.50.

Enock, C. R., Republics of Central and South America. Scribner,
1922. $4.50.

Spanish America. 2 vols. Scribner, 1920. $8.00.
States of South America. Macmillan. 1920. $5.00.
Foster, H. L. T., Adventures of a Tropical Tramp. Dodd, 1922. $3.00.
If You Go to South America, Dodd, 1928. $3.00.
Tropical Tramp with the Tourists. Dodd, 1925. $3.00.
Franck, H. A., South America. Owen, 1928. 96 cents.

Vagabonding Down the Andes. Century, 1917. $5.00.
Working North from Patagonia. Century, 1921. $5.00.
Frank, Waldo, American Hispana. Scribner, 1931. $3.50.
Garner, J. W., American Foreign Policies. New York University

Press, 1928. $6.00.

Gibbons, H. A., The New Map of South America. Century, 1928.
$3.00.

Bibliography 253

Gill, Tom, Tropical Forests of the Caribbean. Tropical Plant Re-
search Foundation, 1931. $5.00.
Goldberg, I., Studies in Spanish American Literature. Brentano's,

1920. $2.50.

Halliburton, R., New Worlds to Conquer. Bobbs- Merrill, 1929. $5.00.
Hasbrouck, A., Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish

South America. Columbia, University Press, 1929. $6.50.
Haring, C. H., South America Looks at the United States. Mac-

millan, 1928. $2.50.
Hill, H. C., Roosevelt and the Caribbean. University of Chicago

Press, 1927. $2.50.

Hudson, W. H., Far Away and Long Ago. Button, 1918. $2.00.
(All of Hudson's books are available in libraries and re-
prints.)

Hughes, Charles Evans, The Centenary of the Monroe Doctrine,
Washington. Government Printing Office, 1923. By request
from Department of State.

Observations on the Monroe Doctrine. Government Print-
ing Office, 1923. By request from Department of State.
Our Relations to the Nations of the Western Hemisphere.

Princeton University Press, 1928. $1.75.
Inman, S. G., Problems in Pan Americanism. Doubleday, Doran,

1925. $2.00.
James, H. G., and Martin, P. A., The Republics of Latin America.

Harper, 1923. $3.50.

Jane, Cecil, Liberty and Despotism in Spanish America. Oxford
Clarendon Press, 1929. $2.50.

Four Voyages of Columbus. Vol. I. Haklyut Society, 1930,
Jones, C. F., Commerce of South America. Ginn, 1928. $3.50.

South America. Henry Holt, 1930. $6.00.

Jones, Chester Lloyd, Caribbean Backgrounds and Prospects. Apple-
ton, 1931. $4.00.
Kelchner, W. H., Latin American Relations with the League of

Nations. World Peace Foundation, 1929. $0.75.
Koebel, W. H., Great South-land. London. Butterworth, 1920. 155.

South America. London. Unwin, 1918. i8s.
Kohler, C., The Monroe Doctrine. J. J. Little & Ives Co., 1925. $1.00.
Latane, J. H., History of American Foreign Policy. Doubleday,

Doran, 1927. $4.00.

Lemley, H. R., Bolivar. Stratford, 1923. $4.00.
Lockley, J. B., Pan Americanism, its Beginnings. Macmillan, 1920.
$2.75.

254 Greater America

Long, W. Rodney, Railways of Central America and West Indies.
Government Printing Office, 1925. 70 cents.

Railways of Mexico. Government Printing Office, 1925.

35 cents.

Railways of South America, Part II. Bolivia, Colombia,
Ecuador, Guianas, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Vene-
zuela (for Part I, Argentina, see Brady, George S.).
Government Printing Office, 1927. 85 cents.
MacCorkle, W. A., The Personal Genesis of the Monroe Doctrine.

Putnam, 1923. $1.50.

MacCreagh, G., White Waters and Black. Century, 1926. $4.00.
Madariaga, Salvador, Americans. Oxford University Press, 1930.

$2.50.

May, S. B., Men, Maidens and Mantillas. Century, 1923. $3.50.
Means, Philip A., Ancient Civilizations of the Andes. Scribner,

1931. $7.50.

Miller, L. E., In the Wilds of South America. Scribner, 1918. $6.00.
Moon, P. T., Imperialism and World Politics. Macmillan, 1926.

$4.50.
Moore, J. B., The Principles of American Diplomacy. Harper, 1918.

$2.75.
Moses, Bernard, Spain's Declining Power in South America. 1730-

1806. University of California Press, 1919. $4.00.
Nearing, Scott and Freeman, J., Dollar Diplomacy. Huebsch, 1925.

$2.50.
Normano, J. F., The Struggle for South America, Houghton

Mifflin, 1930. $4.00.

Pan American Union. (Publishes a large number of pamphlets that
are sold at a nominal price. These pamphlets are issued with a
serial number under the general heading of: American Nations
Series; American City Series; Commodity Series; Law and
Treaty Series; Foreign Trade Series; Education Series; Fine Arts
Series; Literature Series; Library and Bibliography Series;
Feminism in the Americas Series; American Archaeology Series;
Agriculture and Forestry Series; National Hero Series; Industrial
Series; Social Problems Series. In addition to these series is also
published a monthly magazine in English, Spanish and Portu-
guese and monographs on special subjects. List of publications
available can be had on application.)

Peck, Annie S., Industrial and Commercial South America. Crowell,
1927. $3.50.

South American Tour. Doubleday, Doran, 1924. $3.50.

Bibliography 255

Perkins, D., The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-1825. Harvard University

Historical Studies, 1927. $3.50.
Rippy, J. Fred, Latin America in World Politics. Knopf, 1928.

$3*5-

Rivalry of the United States and Great Britain over Latin
America (1808-1830). Johns Hopkins Press, 1929.
$2.75.

Reid, W. A., Ports and Harbors of South America. Pan American
Union, 1926. 25 cents.

Seeing South America. Pan American Union, 1928. 25 cts.
Seeing the Latin Republics of North America. Pan Amer-

can Union, 1926. 25 cents.

Robertson, W. S., Hispanic-American Relations with the United
States. Oxford University Press, 1923. $4.00.

History of the Latin American Nations. Appleton, 1925.

$4.00.

Root, Elihu, Addresses on International Subjects. Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1916. $5.00.

Ross, E. A., South of Panama. Century, 1915. $3.00.
Rothery, A., South America, the West Coast and the East.

Houghton, Mifflin, 1930. $4.00.
Schoellkopf, A., Don Jose de San Martin, 1778-1850. Liveright, 1924.

$2.00.
Sears, L. M., A History of American Foreign Relations. Crowell,

1927. $3.50.

Shanahan, E. W., South America. Dutton, 1927. $3.75.

Shepherd, W. R., Latin America. Holt, 1924. $1.00.

Sherrill, C. H., Modernizing the Monroe Doctrine. Houghton,

Mifflin, 1916. $1.25.

Sherwood, F. A., Glimpses of South America. Century, 1920. $4.00.
Stevenson, J., A Traveller of the Sixties. London. Constable & Co.,

1929. I2S 6d.
Stuart, G. H., Latin America and the United States. 2d ed. Century,

1928. $3.75.

Sweet, W. W., A History of Latin America. Abingdon Press, 1929.

$3.00.
Thomas, D. Y., One Hundred Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1823-

1923. Macmillan, 1923. $3.00.
Townsend, Charles W., From Panama to Patagonia. Witherby,

London, 1931. 125 6d.
Tyler, A. F., The Foreign Policy of James G. Blaine. University of

Minnesota Press, 1927. $3.50.

256 Greater America

U. S, Department of Commerce, Commercial Travellers' Guide to
Latin America. Government Printing Office, 1931. $1.50.

U. S. Government. Foreign Trade Bulletins, also catalogs under
various national and subject divisions. These catalogs should be
sent for, free, and latest works listed therein purchased, on every
subject under study. Address, Superintendent of Documents,
Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C.

Vaucaire, M., Bolivar the Liberator. Houghton, Mifflin, 1929. $3.50.

Verrill, A. H., Great Conquerors of South and Central America.
Appleton, 1929. $3.00.

Old Civilizations of the New World. Bobbs-Merrill, 1929.

$5.00.
Thirty Years in the Jungle. Lane. 1929. $8.00.

Warshaw, J., The New Latin America. Crowell, 1922. $3.00.

Webster, H., History of Latin America. Heath, 1924. $1.65.

Whitbeck, R, H., Economic Geography of South America. McGraw.
Revised ed. 1931. $3.50.

Williams, H. W., The People and Politics of Latin America. Ginn,
1930. $4.60.

Ybarra, T. R., Bolivar, the Passionate Warrior. Washburn, 1929.
$4.00.

Zahm, J. A., Along the Andes and Down the Amazon. Appleton,
1911. $5,00. ,

Through South America's Southland. Appleton, 1916. $5.00.

ARGENTINE REPUBLIC

Barrett, Robert, A Yankee in Patagonia. Houghton-Mifflin, 1931.

$2.50.
Cady, J-iF-, Foreign Intervention in the Rio de la Plata, 1838-50.

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929. $4.00.
Denis, P., The Argentine Republic. Scribner, 1922. $6.00.
Elliott, L. E., The Argentin^ of Today London. Hurst & Blackett,

1925. 1 8s.

Hammerton, J. A., Real Argentina. Dodd, 1915. $3.50.
Hirst, W. A., Argentine. (South American Series.) Scribner. $4.50.
Hudson, W. H., Idle Days in Patagonia. Dutton, 1923. $2.00.

(See also Hudson's earlier works in libraries or reprint editions.)
Koebel, W. H., The New Argentina. Dodd, 1923. $3.00.
Laguardia, G. G. B. and C. G. B. ed., Argentina: Legend and

History. Sanborn, 1919. $1.25.
Kirkpatrick, F. A., History of the Argentine Republic, University

Press, 1931. $5.00.

Bibliography 257

Mills, G. J., Argentina. Appleton, 1915. $3.00.

Ross, G., Argentina and Uruguay. Macmillan, 1916. $3.50.

Rowe, L. S., Federal System of the Argentine Republic. Carnegie

Institution of Washington, 1921. $2.00.
Winter, N. CX, Argentina and Her People of Today. Page, 1911.

$3-75-

BOLIVIA

Bandelier, A. J., Islands of Titicaca. Hispanic Society of America,
1910. $10.00.

Grey, H. M., The Land of Tomorrow. London. Wither by, 1927.
I2S. 6d.

Guise, A. V. L., Six Years in Bolivia. London. Unwin, 1922. 2is.

Marsh, M. A., Bankers in Bolivia. Scribner, 1928. $4.50.

Post, C. J., Across the Andes. Macmillan, 1922. $2.50.

Prodgers, C. H., Adventures in Bolivia. London. Lane, 1922.
i2s 6d.

United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce; Bolivia: a
commercial and industrial handbook. By W. L. Schurz. Gov-
ernment Printing* Office, 1921. 65 cents. (Special agents series
No. 208.)

Walle, P., Bolivia (South American Series). Scribner, 1914. $4.50.

BRAZIL

Bates, H. W., Naturalist on the River Amazon. Dutton. Rev. ed.

1910. 80 cents. (First published in 1863.)
Bruce, G. J., Brazil and the Brazilians, Dodd, 1914. $3.00.
Carpenter, F. G., Along the Parana and the Amazon. Doubleday,

Doran, 1925. $4.00.

Cooper, C. S., Brazilians and Their Country. Stokes, 1926. $5.00.
Denis, P., Brazil. (South American Series.) Scribner, 1911. $4.50.
Domville Fife, C. S., Among the Wild Tribes of the Amazon.

London, Seeley, Service, 1924. 2 is.
Dyott, G. M., Man Hunting in the Jungle. Bobbs-Merrill, 1930.

$5.00.

Elliott, L. E., Brazil Today and Tomorrow. Macmillan, 1922. $3.00.
Goldberg, L, Brazilian Literature. Knopf, 1922. $3.00.
James, H. G., Brazil after a Century of Independence, Macmillan,

1925. $4.00.
Lange, A., In the Amazon Jungle. Putnam, 1912. $2.50.

Lower Amazon. Putnam, 1914. $2.50.
McGovern, W. M., Jungle Paths and Inca Ruins. Century, 1927.

$5.00.

258 Greater America

Nash, R., Conquest of Brazil. Harcourt, 1926. $5.00.

Pearson, H., The Diamond Trail. London. Witherby, 1926. I2s 6d.

Roosevelt, T., Through the Brazilian Wilderness. Scribner, 1914.

$3-00-

jTomlinson, H. M., The Sea and the Jungle. Button, 1921. $2.50,
Winter, N. 0., Brazil and Her People of Today. Page, 1929. $6.00.

CENTRAL AMERICA

Carpenter, F. G., Lands of the Caribbean. Doubleday, Doran, 1925.

$4,00.
Crowther, S., The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics.

Doubleday, Doran, 1929. $5.00.
Elliott, L. E., Central America. Dodd, 1925, $5.00.
Gann, Thomas, Ancient Cities and Modern Tribes. Scribner, 1926.

$5.00.

Discoveries and Adventures in Central America. Scribner,

1929. $5.00.

History of the Maya. Scribner, 1931. $2.50,
Maya Cities. Scribner, 1927. $5.00.
Mystery Cities, Scribner, 1925, $5.00,

Hopkins, J. A. H., Machine-Gun Diplomacy. Copeland, 1928. $2.50.
Jones, Chester Lloyd, Caribbean Backgrounds and Prospects. Apple-
ton, 1931. $4.00.
Koebel, W. H., Central America. (South American Series.)

Scribner, 1914. $4.50.
Munro, D. G., The Five Republics of Central America. Oxford

University Press, 1918. $3.50.

Putnam, G. P., Southland of North America. Putnam, 1913. $2.50.
Puxley, W. L., Magic Land of the Maya. Dodd, 1928. $4.00.
Roberts, M., On the Earthquake Line. London. Arrowsmith, 1924.

155.
Rothery, A., Central America and the Spanish Main. Houghton-

Mifflin, 1929. $3.00.

Ruhl, A. B., Central Americans. Scribner s, 1928. $3.00.
Thompson, Wallace, Rainbow Countries of Central America. Dut-

ton, 1926. $3.00.
Young, J. P,, Central American Currency and Finance. Princeton

University Press, 1925. $2.50.

Bibliography 259

CHILE

Barclay, W. S., The Land of Magellan. Brentano's. $4.00.
Bowman, I., Desert Trails of Atacama. American Geographical

Society, 1924. $5.00.
Brown, J. M., The Riddle of the Pacific. Small, Maynard, 1924.

$6.00.
Dennis,, William J., Tacna and Arica. Yale University Press, 1931.

Edwards, Augustin, My Native Land. London. Benn. 1928. 285.

Peoples of Old. London. Benn. 1929. 285.

Elliott, L. E., Chile Today and Tomorrow. Macmillan, 1922. $5,00.
Evans, H. C., Jr., Chile and its Relations with the United States.

Duke University Press, 1927. $2.50.
Kent, Rockwell, Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan.

Putnam, 1924. $7.50.
Maitland, F. J. G., Chile, its Land and People. London. Griffith,

1914. i2s. 6d.

May, F. C., 2000 miles through Chile. Century, 1924. $3.50.
Sherman, W. R., Diplomatic and Commercial Relations of the United

States and Chile, 1820-1914. Badger, 1926. $3.00.
Winter, N. O., Chile and Her People of Today. Page, 1912. $3.75.

COLOMBIA

Eder, Phanor J., Colombia. (South American series.) Scribner,
1913. $4.50.

Graham, R. B. C., Conquest of New Granada. Houghton-Mifflin,
$4.00.

Levine, V., Colombia. Appleton, 1914. $1.50.

Mcfee, William, Sunlight in New Granada. Doubleday-Doran, 1925.
$2.00.

Niles, Blair, Colombia, Land of Miracles. Century, 1924. $3.50.

United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Colombia,
a commercial and industrial handbook. By P. L. Bell. Wash-
ington. Government Printing Office, 1921. 70 cents. (Special
agents series No, 206.)

COSTA RICA

Calvert, A. C. and P. P., Year of Costa-Rican natural history. Mac-
millan, 1917. $3.00.

Elliott, L. E., Central America. Dodd, 1925. $5.00. (Contains
chapter on Costa Rica.)

260 Greater America

Koebel, W. H., Central America. Scribner, 1914. $4.50. (Contains

chapter on Costa Rica.)
Ruhl, A., The Central Americans. Scribner, 1928. $3.00. (Contains

chapter on Costa Rica.)
Thompson, Wallace, Rainbow countries of Central America. Button,

1926. $3.00. (Contains chapter on Costa Rica.)

CUBA

Chapman, C. E., History of the Cuban Republic. Macmillan, 1927.

$5.00.

Hergesheimer, J., San Cristobal de la, Habana. Knopf, 1920. $2.00.
Lindsay, R, Cuba and Her People of Today. Page, 1928. $4.00.
Millis, Walter, The Martial Spirit. Houghton-MifHin, 1931. $4.00.
Terry, T. P., Terry's Guide to Cuba. Houghton-Mifflin, 1929. $3.50.
Verrill, A. H., Cuba Past and Present. Dodd, 1920. $2.00.
Woom, B. D., When it's Cocktail Time in Cuba. Liveright, 1928.

$2.50.
Wright, I. A., Cuba- Macmillan, 1910, $2.50.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Knight, M. M., The Americans in Santo Domingo. Vanguard Press,

1928. $1.00.
St. Elmo, W. M., Santo Domingo-Dominican Republic, 1905 to 1925.

Santo Domingo, J. R. vda. Garcia. $2.00.
Welles, Sumner, Naboth's Vineyard. Payson and Clark, 1928. $7.50.

ECUADOR

Beebe, C. W., Galapagos, World's End. Putnam, 1924. $5.00.
Dyott, G. M., On the Trail of the Unknown. Putnam, 1926. $5.00.
Enock, C. R., Ecuador, (South American Series.) Scribner, 1914.

$4*5-

Jordan, W. F., Ecuador. Christian Alliance Pub., 1926. $1.50.
Niles, Blair, Casual Wanderings in Ecuador. Century, 1923. $2.50.
Up de Graff, F. W., Head Hunters of the Amazon. DufSeld, 1923.

$5.00.

GUATEMALA

Elliott, L. E., Central America. Dodd, $5.00. (Contains chapter on
Guatemala.)

Franck, H. A., Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Hon-
duras. Century, 1916. $3.00.

Bibliography 261

Koebel, W. H., Central America. Scribner, 1914. $4.50. (Contains

chapter on Guatemala.)
Prince William of Sweden, Between Two Continents. London.

Nash and Grayson, 1922. 155.
Roberts, M., On the Earthquake Line. London, Arrowsmith, 1924.

155. (Contains chapter on Guatemala.)
Ruhl, A., The' Central Americans. Scribner, 1928. $3.00. (Contains

chapter on Guatemala.)
Thompson, Wallace, Rainbow Countries of Central America. Dut-

ton, 1926. $3.00. (Contains chapter on Guatemala.)
Winter, N. O., Guatemala and Her People of Today. Page, 1909.

GUIANAS

Beebe, C. W., Edge of the Jungle. Holt, 1921. $2.50.
Jungle Days. Putnam, 1925. $3.00.
Jungle Peace. Holt, 1918. $2.50.

Beebe, M. B., Our Search for a Wilderness. Holt, 1910. $3.00.
Clementi, C., Through British Guiana to the Summit of Roraima.

London. Unwin, 1920. I2S. 6d.

Great Britain. Foreign Office: Dutch Guiana. (Handbook prepared
under the direction of the historical section of the foreign office.)
London. H. M. Stationery Office, 1920.

French Guiana. (Handbook prepared under the direction
of the historical section of the foreign office.) London.
(H. M. Stationery Office, 1920.)
Leechman, A. ed. ? British Guiana Handbook. London. Dulau,

1913. as.
Richardson, G., On the Diamond Trail in British Guiana. Bren-

tano's, $5.00.
Rodway, J., Guiana: Dutch, British, and French. (South American

Series), 1912. Scribner, $4.50.
Vandercock, J. W., "Tom-Tom." Harper, 1926. $3.50.

HAITI

Balch, E. G., Occupied Haiti. Writers Pub. Co., 1927. $2.00.

Davis, H. P., Black Democracy. Dial, 1928. $5.00.

Marshall, Harriet, The Story of Haiti. Christopher, 1930. fi.6o.

Niles, B., Black Haiti. Putnam, 1926, $3.50.

Seabrook, W. B., The Magic Island. Harcourt, 1929. $3.50.

Vandercock, J. W., Black Majesty. Harper, 1928. $2.50.

Waxman, Percy, The Black Napoleonj Harcourt, 1931. $3.50.

262 Greater America

HONDURAS

Deutsch, Harmann R., The Incredible Yanqui. Longman, 1931.
$3.50.

Elliott, L. E., Central America. Dodd, 1925. $5.00. (Contains
chapter on Honduras.)

Franck, H. A., Tramping through Mexico, Guatemala and Hon-
duras. Century, 1916. $3.00.

Koebel, W. H., Central America. Scribner, 1914. $4.50. (Contains
chapter on Honduras.)

Roberts, M., On the Earthquake Line. London. Arrowsmith, 1924.
155. (Contains chapter on Honduras.)

Ruhl, A., The Central Americans. Scribner, 1928. $3.00. (Con-
tains chapter on Honduras.)

Thompson, Wallace, Rainbow Countries of Central America. Dut-
ton, 1926. $3.00. (Contains chapter on Honduras.)

MEXICO
Benning, G. H., In Mexican Waters. London. Hopkinson, 1925.

$4-50-
Beals, C., Brimstone and Chili. Knopf, 1927. $5.00.

Mexico, an Interpretation. Viking, 1923. $2.50.
The Mexican Maze. Lippincott, 1931. $3.00.
Blakcslee, G. H. ed., Mexico and the Caribbean. Stechert, 1920.

$4.00.

Brehme, H., Picturesque Mexico. Brentano's, 1925. $7.50.
Brenner, A., Idols Behind Altars. Payson & Clarke, 1929- $5.00.
Brown, J. W., Modern Mexico and its Problems. London. Labour

Pub. Co., 1927. 45 7d.

Calderon de la Barca, F. E. I., Life in Mexico. Dutton, 1931. $3.00.
Callcott, W. H., Church and State in Mexico. 1822-1857. Duke

University Press, 1926. $4.00.

Cameron, C., Mexico in Revolution. Lippincott, 1925. $5.00.
Case, A. B., Thirty Years with the Mexicans. Revell, 1917. $1.75.
Cleland, R. G. ed., Mexican Year Book. Times Mirror Press, 1924.

$7-50.

Cortes, H., Five Letters, 1519-1526. McBride, 1929. $4.00.
Corti, E. C. Count, Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico. Knopf,

1929. 2 Vols. $10.00.

Creel, G., The People Next Door. Day, 1926. $4,00.
Diaz del Castillo, B., True History of the Conquest of Mexico.

McBride, 1927. $10,00.

Bibliography 263

Flandrau, C. M., Viva Mexico. Appleton, 1908. $2.00.
Foster, H. L. T., Gringo in Manana-Land. Dodd, 1924. $3.00.
Franck, H. A., Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Hon-
duras. Century, 1916. $3.00.
Gann, Thomas, Ancient Cities and Modern Tribes. Exploration and

Adventure in Maya Lands. Scribner, 1926. $5.00.
In an Unknown Land. Scribner, 1924. $5.00.
Gillpatrick, Wallace, The Man who Likes Mexico. Century, 1911.

$3.00.

Graham, S., In Quest of El Dorado. Appleton, 1923. $2.00.
Gruening, E. H., Mexico and its Heritage. Century, 1928. $6.00.
Hackett, C. W., Mexican Revolution and the United States. 1910-

1926. World Peace Foundation, 1926. 5 cents.
Ingersoll, R. M., In and Under Mexico. Century, 1924. $2.50.
Inman, S. G., Intervention in Mexico. Assn. Press, 1919. $1.50.
Jones, C. L., Mexico and its Reconstruction. Appleton, 1911. $3.50.
Lang, A. ed., Conquest of Montezuma's Empire. Longman's, 1928.

$2.00.

Lawrence, D. H., Mornings in Mexico. Knopf, 1927. $2.50.
Lumholtz, K. S., New Trails in Mexico. Scribner' s, 1912. $6.00.
McLean, R. M., That) Mexican! Revell, 1928. $2.00.
Mason, G., Silver Cities of Yucatan. Putnam, 1927. $3.50.
Mechan, J. L., Francisco de Ibarra and Nueva Vizcaya. Duke

University Press, 1927. $3.50.
Obregon, B. de., History of i6th Century Explorations in Western

America. Wetzel Pub. Co., 1928. $10.00.
O'Shaughnessy, Edith, Intimate Pages of Mexican History. Doran,

1920. $3.00.
Prescott, W. H., History of the Conquest of Mexico. Dutton. 2V.

90 cents each.

Priestly, H. L, Mexican Nation, a History. Macmillan, 1923. $4.00.
Quinn, V., Beautiful Mexico. Stokes, 1924. $4.00.
Redfield, R., Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village. University of Chicago

Press, 1930. $3.00.
Relyea, P. S., Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and

Mexico under Porfirio Diaz, 1876-1910. Smith College, 1925.

75 cents. i

Rippy and Others, J. Fred, Mexico. University of Chicago Press,

1928. $1.50.

Rippy, J. Fred, The United States and Mexico. Knopf, 1926. $5.00.
Ross, E. A., Social Revolution in Mexico. Century, 1923. $1.75.

264 Greater A merica

Russell, P., Red Tiger: Adventures in Yucatan and Mexico. Bren-
tano's, 1929, $5.00.

Saenz, M., and Priestley, H. I., Some Mexican Problems. University
of Chicago Press, 1926. $2.00.

Schnitzler, H. ed., Republic of Mexico. Frank-Maurice, 1924. $6.00.

Sedgwick, H. D., Cortes the Conqueror. Bobbs-Merrill, 1926.
$5.00.

Spence, L., The Gods of Mexico. Stokes, 1923. $7.50.

Spindler, H. J., Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central Amer-
ica. Am. Museum o Natural History, 1922. 75 cents.

Storm, Marian, Prologue to Mexico. Knopf, 1931. $3.50.

Tannenbaum, F., The Mexican Agrarian Revolution. Macmillan,
1929. $2.50.

Terry, T. P., Guide to Mexico. 1930 Houghton. $3.50.

Thompson, Wallace, The Mexican Mind. Little Brown, 1922. $2.50.
The People of Mexico. Harper, 1921. $3.00.
Trading with Mexico. Dodd, 1922. $2,00.

Trowbridge, E. D., Mexico Today and Tomorrow. Macmillan, 1919.

$2.00.

United States Bureau of foreign and domestic commerce: Mexican
west coast and Lower California, a commercial and industrial
survey. By P. L. Bell. Washington, Government Printing
Office, 1923. 85 cents. (Special agents series, No. 220.)

Vasconcelos, J. and Gamio, M., Aspects of Mexican Civilization.
University of Chicago Press, 1926. $2.00.

Walling, W. English, The Mexican Question. Robins Press, 1927.

$2.00.

Weeks, G. F., Mexico from Muleback. Revell, 1925. $2.50.
Winter, N. O., Mexico and Her People of Today, 1923. $4.00.
Winton, G. B., Mexico Past and Present. Cokesbury Press, 1928.
$2.00.

NICARAGUA.

Cox, I. J., Nicaragua and the United States, 1909-1927. World

Peace Foundation, 1927. $1.25.

Cramer, F., Our Neighbor Nicaragua. Stokes, 1929. $2.00.
Denny, H. N., Dollars for Bullets. Dial Press, 1929. $4.00.
Elliott, L. E., Central America. Dodd, 1925. $5.00. (Contains

chapter on Nicaragua.)
Koebel, W. H., Central America. Scribner, 1914. $4.00. (Contains

chapter on Nicaragua.)

Bibliography 265

Ruhl, A., The Central Americans. Scribner, 1928. $3.00. (Con-
tains chapter on Nicaragua.)

Scroggs, W. O., Filibusters and Financiers. Macmillan, 1916. $3.00.

Stimson, H. L., American Policy in Nicaragua. Scribner, 1927.
$1.25. ^ - 1

Thompson, Wallace, Rainbow Countries of Central America. Dut-
ton, 1926. $3.00. (Contains chapter on Nicaragua.)

PANAMA

Bishop, F., Panama, Past and Present. Century, 1916. $1.75.

Bullard, A., Panama, the Canal, the Country and the People. Mac-
millan, 1914. $3.00.

Chapman, F. M., My Tropical Air Castle; Nature Studies in Panama.
Appleton, 1929. $5.00.

Lindsay, F., Panama and the Canal Today. Page, 1926. $5.00,

Marden, P. S., Sailing South. Houghton Mifflin, 1921, $3.50.

Miller, G. A., Prowling about Panama. Abingdon, 1919. $2.00.

Miller, H. G., The Isthmian Highway. Macmillan, 1929. $4.50.

Robinson, T., Fifty Years in Panama. Trow, 1907. $1.50.

Smith, D. H., Panama Canal. Johns Hopkins. $2.50.

Verrill, A. H., Panama Today. Dodd, 1927. $2.00.

PARAGUAY

Box, P. H., Origins of the Paraguayan War. University of Illinois,
1927. v$4-oo.

Carpenter, H. G., Along the Parana and the Amazon. Doublcday-
Doran, 1925. $4.00.

Grubb, W. B,, An Unknown People in an Unknown Land. Lon-
don. Seeley, 1911. i6s.

Hills, J. W. and Dunbar, I. M., Golden River; Sport and Travel in
Paraguay. London. Allen, xos 6d.

Koebel, W. H., In Jesuit Land. London. Stanley Paul. I2S 6d.

Paraguay. (South American series.) Scribner, 1917. $4.50.

Macdonald, A. K., Picturesque Paraguay. London. Kelly, 1911.
i6s.

United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce: Para-
guay. A Commercial Handbook. By W. L. Schurz. Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1920. 40 cents. (Special agents series,
No. 199.)

266 Greater America

PERU

Bingham, H., Inca Land. Houghton Mifflin, 1922, $5.00.

Machu Picchu. Yale University Press, 1930.
Bowman, I., Andes of Southern Pen! Am. Geographical Society,

1916. $3.50. f

Dell, A., Llama land, East and West of the Andes in Peru.

Doubleday-Doran, 1927. $10.00.
Dixon, T., The Sun Virgin. Liveright, 1929, $2.00.
Dyott, G. M., Silent Highways of the Jungle. Putnam, 1922. $6.00.
Knock, C. R, Peru. (South American Series.) Scribner, 1908.

14.50.

Hanstein, O. von, The World of the Incas. Button, 1925. $2.50.
Kroeber, A. L., Archaelogical Explorations in Peru. Field Museum

of Natural History, 1926. $2.50.
McGovern, W. M., Jungle Paths and Inca Ruins. Century, 1927.

$5.00.

Martin, P. F., Peru of the XXth Century. Longmans, 1911. $4.20.
Michener, C. K., Heirs of the Incas. Minton, 1924. $3.00
Montell, G., Dress and Ornaments in Ancient Peru. Oxford, 1929.

$6.00,

Murphy, R. C., Bird Islands of Peru. Putnam, 1925. $5.00.
Poindexter, Miles, The Ayar-Incas. - 2 vols. Liveright, 1930. $10.00.
Prescott, W. H., History of the Conquest of Peru. Dutton, 1909.

90 cents.

Prodgers, C. H., Adventures in Peru. Dutton, 1925. $4.00. ^
United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce: Peru. A

commercial handbook. By W. E. Dunn. Washington, Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1^925. $1.25. (Trade promotion series,

No. 25.)
Vivian, E. C., Peru. Appleton, 1914. $1.50.

SALVADOR

Elliott, L. E., Central America. Dodd, $5.001925. (Contains

chapter on Salvador.)
Koebel, W. H., Central America. Scribner, 1914. $4.50. (Contains

chapter on Salvador.)
Martin, P. F., Salvador of the Twentieth Century. Longman, 1911.

$5-00.

Roberts, M,, On the Earthquake Line. London. Arrowsmith, 1924.
155. (Contains chapter on Salvador.)

Bibliography 267

Ruhl, A., The Central Americans. Scribner, 1928. $3.00. (Contains
chapter on Salvador.)

Thompson, Wallace, Rainbow Countries of Central America. But-
ton, 1926. $3.00. (Contains chapter on Salvador.)

URUGUAY

Carpenter, F. G., Along the Parana and the Amazon. Doubleday-

Doran, 1925. $4.00.

Hudson, W. H., The Purple Land. Dutton, 1916, $2.50.
Koebel, W. H., Uruguay. (South American series.) Scribner, 1911.

$4-50.
Ross, G., Argentina and Uruguay. Macmillan, 1916. $3.50.

VENEZUELA
Dal ton, L. V., Venezuela. (South American series.) Scribner, 1912.

$4-50-

Friel, A. O., River of Seven Stars. Harper, 1924. $3.50.

Graham, R. B. C., Jose Antonio Paez, London. W. Heinemann,
1929. 155.

Robertson, W. S., The Diary of Francisco de Miranda, Tour of the
United States, 1783-1784. Hispanic Society of America, 1928.
Life of Miranda, 2 volumes, University of North Carolina
Press, 1929. $10.00.

United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce: Vene-
zuela. A commercial and industrial handbook with a chapter
on the Dutch West Indies. By P. L. Bell. Washington, Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1922. $1.00. (Special agents series,
No. 212.)

Zahm, J. A. (Mozans, H. }. pseud.), Up the Orinoco and Down the
Magdalena. Appleton, 1910. $2.00.

WEST INDIES

Allen, G. W., Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates. Salem, Mass.

Essex Institute, 1929. $3.50.
Aspinwall, A. E., Pocket Guide to the West Indies. Brentano's.

$3-50.

Wayfarer in the West Indies. Houghton Mifflin, 1928,

$3.00.

Bell, A., Spell of the Caribbean Islands. Page, 1926. $3.75.
Davis, W. M., The Lesser Antilles. American Geographical Society,
1926. $3.50.

268 Greater America

England, G. A., Isles of Romance. Century, 1929. $3.50.

Fenger, F. A., Alone in the Caribbean. Doubleday-Doran, 1917.

$3.00.
Foster, H. L., Combing the Caribbees. Dodd, 1929. $3.00.

The Caribbean Cruise. Dodd, 1928. $3.00.
Franck, H. A., Roaming Through the West Indies, Century, 1920.

$5.00.
Gaunt, M. E. B., Where the Twain Meet. London. Murray, 1922.

155.
Hearn, L., Two Years in the French West Indies. Harper, 1923.

$4.00.
Inman, S. G., Trailing the Conquistadores. Friendship Press, 1930.

$1.00.

Jones, Chester Lloyd, The United States and the Caribbean. Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1929. $1.50.

Caribbean Backgrounds and Prospects. Appleton, 1931.

$4.00.
McKenna, S., By Intervention of Providence. Little Brown, 1923.

$2.50.

Manington, G., West Indies. Scribner, 1925. $4.00.
Marden, P. S., Sailing South. Houghton Mifflin, 1921. $3.50.
Ober, F. A., Guide to the West Indies, Bermuda and Panama. Dodd,

1920. $3.50.

Treves, Sir. F., Cradle of the Deep. Dutton, 1925. $4.00.
Verrill, A. H., Book of the West Indies. Dutton, 1917. $4.00.

In the Wake of the Buccaneers. Century, 1923. $4.00.
Wok, M. S. and Mier, I. A. de, Guide Book to Porto Rico. Bren-

tano's, 1928. $1.00.

INDEX

INDEX

Air mails, 112

Airplanes, 25, 41, 83, 92, 109, 144

All America Cables, 119

Altitudes, 56

Alvarado, Pedro de, 40

Amazon River, 47, 92, 145, 164

Antilles, 53

Antofagasta, Chile, 95, 97

Apure river, 47, 92

Araucanian Indians, 200

Arbitration, 244

Area of Latin America, 39

Areas to Be Reclaimed, The,

Chap. Ill, 39
Argentina, highways, 107

immigration, 69

imports, 136

revolution, 212
Atahualpa, 127
Automobiles, 107
Aviation, 109 f

See also Airplanes
Ayacucho, Battle of, 208
Aztecs, 200, 201

B

Elaine, James G., 101, 190
Bolivar, Sim<5n, 40, 199, 208, 209,

213, 222

Bolivia, 128, 129, 170, 222
Boundaries, 223, "ff
Braden Copper Co., 133
Branch factories, 194

Brazil, 39, 70, 130
British investments, 176

immigration, 18, 70

trade, 84

c

Cables, 119

Callao, Peni, 96

Calles, Plutarcho Elias, 65

Calvo, Carlos, 232

Camino real, 103

Canning, George, 20

Caribbean Sea, 17, 42, 84, 231

Casas, Bartolomeo de las, 61

Castes, 31, 63

Central American Union, 222

Cerro de Pasco, Peru, 128, 133

Chaco, 49, 52, 129, 224

Chamizal, 225

Chibcha Indians, 61

Chile, 128, 131, 133, 212

air lines, in

loans, 174

Chinese immigration, 75, 154
Christ of the Andes, 224
Chuquicamata, Chile, 128, 133
City, population trends to, 78
Clark, J. Reuben, 230
Clay, Henry, 244
Cleveland, Grover, 227
Climate, 56, 161
Coal, 128, 130, 141
Coffee, 18, 25, 145, 148, 155, 191
Colombia, 90, 173
Columbus, Christopher, 82, 199

271

272

Greater America

Commodity prices, 16, 20, 22, 126

Communications, The Growth
of, Chap. V, 82

Communism, 66, 217
See also Indianism

Copper, 128, 133, 191

Corporation of Foreign Bond-
holders, 174

Cortes, Hernan, 40

Credits, commercial, 23, 181

Creoles (criollos}> 27, 63

Crop diversification, 155 ff

Cuauhtemoc, 127

Culture, 24, 245

Customs Unions, 191

D

Democracy, 216
Diaz, Porfirio, 73, 212
Dictators, 211, 213, 219, 226
Diseases, 57, 77
Drago, Luis M., 232

Economic autonomy, 26, 38, 123,

125, 136, 165
Economic Power, The Unfolding

of, Chap. VI, 122
Education, 178, 247
Elections, 214
Electric Power, 138 ff
Embargoes, 123
Encomiendas, 31, 66, 145
Enganchados, 146
Engineering, 58, 80, 134, 160, 162
Exploitation. The End of Four

Centuries oj, Chap. II, 27

Fairs, trade, 28, 33

Fawcett Aviation Company, in

Federalized type of government,
210

Fertilizers, 162

Financing, four eras of, 175 ff

Food crops, 156 ff

Ford, Model T, 107

Foreign Gold and Local Busi-
ness, Chap. VII, 169

Foreign Relations, Nationalism
and, Chap. IX, 222

Foreign trade of Latin America,

*7
Forests, 164

Free Trade, 35
Furness-Prince Line, 87

G

Galleons, 82
Gauchos, 69

German immigration, 18, 69
Germany, 229
Gold, 127, 128, 132
Government, types of, 210
Grace Line, 86, 88, 109
Guayule, 152

H

Haiti, 39

Highways, 102 ff

Hindus, 154

Honduras railway loan, 98, 175,

178

Hoover, Herbert, 170, 172, 234
Hughes, Charles Evans, 231, 238

Index

273

Humboldt, Alexander von, 60
Hydroelectric power, 140

I

Ibafiez, Carlos, 212
Immigration, 25, 69 ff

Colonies, 74

Incas, 40, 60, 127, 144, 200
Indianism, 65, 69, 72, 199, 221,

244

Indians, 28, 30, 60, 67, 145, 199
Industrial loans, 173

Llanos, 9, 46
Loans, 35, 169 ff

See also Investments
Lopez, Francisco Solano, 226

M

Machines, 22, 38, 58, 68, 76, 123,
131, 135,^149, 157, 165, 240

Magdalena River, 90

Manufacturing in colonies, 28,
206

Maracaibo, Lake, 46, 91

Industries, 23, 73, 122, 135, 136, Markets, 16, 20, 24, 37, 80

194, 204

Interventions, 233
Investments, 21, 23, 26, 169 ff,

246

Iguazzu Falls, 95
Irigoyen, Hopolito, 212
Iron, 128, 130
Irrigation, 48, 60, 160, 162

J

Japanese immigration, 19, 75, 154
Jesuits, 205

Labor, 75, 132, 144 ff, 177
La Guayra, Venezuela, 96
Lamport & Holt Line, 86
League of Nations, 236 ff
Legal codes, 209, 247
Leguia, Augusto B., 212
Linseed, 195

Martin, Jose de, 40
Maximilian, 227
Mayas, 60, 200, 201
Meats, 25, 158, 196
Meiggs, Henry, 48
Mennonites in Paraguay, 74
Mestizos, 63
Mexican air lines, in

loans, 176

Railway, 99
Mexico, 40, 73, 78, 89, 127, 151,

217
Mexico, The People of, referred

to, 57 ^

Milpa farming, 163
Minas Geraes, Brazil, 130
Mining, 33, 126 ff
Missions, 32

Monopolies of raw materials, 154
Monroe Doctrine, 18, 20, 227 ff

Corrollaries to, 230
Montana, 49

Living, Standard of, 16, 23, 73, Morgan, Sir Henry, 90

75> 136
Llamas, 144

Mormons in Mexico, 74
Motor boats, 91, 92

274

Greater America

Motor trucks, 107, 134, 187
Mountains, 43 ff
Munson Line, 86, 88
Muscles, Machines and the
Jungle, Chap. VII, 144

N

Napoleon, 207

Nationalism and Foreign Rela-
tions, Chap. XI, 222
Negroes, 19, 30, 61, 145
Nicaragua, 89, 214, 218, 234
Nitrates, 25, 50, 131, 133, 154
Nyrba air lines, 109

o

Oranges, 167
Orinoco river, 47, 91

Plantation system, 16, 36, 126,

132, 153
Platinum, 128
Population, 19, 22, 60 ff
Distribution of, 77
Growth from within, 76
of Latin America, 39
See also Immigration
Populations, The Coming of,

Chap. VI, 60
Political problems, 199 ff
Politics and Progress, Chap. X,

199

Port works, 95
Porto Rico, 1 60, 239
Portuguese, influence of, 29, 32,

62, 69, 202 ff
Puerto Bello, fairs at, 33, 84

Pampa, 51

Pan American Airways, 109

Conferences, 101, 105, 170, 235,
239, 246

Highway, 105

Railway, lot, 105

Union, 115, 235, 246
Pan Americanism, 235
Panama, 33, 90, 222

Canal, 17, 42, 57
Paraguay, 129, 226

River, 94
Parana River, 94
Peonage, 146, 147
Peru, 40, 60, 127, 128, 129, 130

Air lines of, in
Petroleum, 46, 129, 134, 141, 191
Pizarro, Francisco, 40, 6r, 127

Races, proportions of, 62
Radio, 41, 114
Radio-telephone, 119
Railways, 48, 98 ff, 168
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 40
Raw materials, 22, 26, 29, 35,

122, 154, 157, 167
Reciprocity, 184, 189 ff
Refrigeration, 58, 139
Repartimientos, 31, 145
Revolutions, 34, 78, 204, 207 ff,

214, 233

Economic bases of, 218
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 97
Rio de la Plata, 52, 94
River communications, 88 ff
Rockefeller International Health

Board, 77

Index

275

Roman Catholic Church, 28, 32,

62, 144, 203 ff
Roosevelt, Theodore, 230
Rubber, 149, 150, 152

Salvador, El, 39

Scadta air lines, 109, no

Silver, 127, 128

Sisal hemp, 154

Soils, 162

Spaniards, influence of, 28, 32,

40, 62, 67, 202 ff, 209, 220
State, Department of, and loans,

172

Steamship communications, 85$
Sucre, Antonio Jose de, 208
Suffrage, 214
Sugar, 54, 148, 155, 162, 189

U

Unfolding of Economic Power,

The, Chap. VI, 122
United Fruit ships, 86
United States, Bureau of public

roads of, 106
Influence of, 79, 217, 223, 224,

238
Latin American policies of, 42,

231
See Monroe Doctrine

See also, Hoover, Herbert;
Hughes, C. E.; Interven-
tions; Monroe Doctrine;
Wilson, Woodrow.

Unitarian type of government,
210

Unity of the Americas, The,
Chap. XII, 242

Uruguay, 214, 222

Tampico, Mexico, 137
Tariff, 36, 123, 184$
Tariffs and Trade, Chap. IX, 184
Telegraph systems, 117
Telephones, 118
Tin, 128, 155
Tordesillas, treaty of, 223
Treasure-House, the Last, Chap.

I. 15

Tropics, 15, 25, 29, 39, 56, 139,

145, 164
Tractors, 166
Transcontinental railways, 99

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 90
Viceroys, Spanish, 202, 223
Venezuela, 91

w

War of the Pacific, 225
Ward Line, 86, 88
Wars, foreign, 226
Wealth, per capita, 142
Wheat, 154, 157, 158
Willemstad, Curasao, 95, 97
Wilson, Woodrow, 234
Women in the colonies, 63
workers, 80

126891